One of the partners of the #BiCIKL_H02020 project is the Meise Botanical Garden: Sofie Meeus is a researcher in Botany at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium and a task leader in the BiCIKL project.

Meise is very well known in Belgium. Can you talk briefly about it for our European audience?

Meise Botanic Garden has living plant collections and a big herbarium that has just been digitised. Our main focus is on the taxonomy and the conservation of plants and fungi. We also organise lots of citizen science activities and we also do research on invasive plant species.

Why do Meise ride BiCIKL?

We are riding this BiCIKL because we want to get a better value out of our digital collection and we want more people to be able to use this digital collection. We want to comply better with standards to make our data more interoperable and more useful.

We are looking for ways and best practices to better organise the different data types that we hold in the institution and better link them so that we can better support the ongoing taxonomic research in our institution.

What does this represent to you?

I was really glad to be part of the organisation of the BiCIKL hackathon that took place in Meise Botanic Garden because I got the opportunity to become part of the BiCIKL community, get to know many interesting people and learn lots about different data types and get a better picture of what the biodiversity infrastructure is about.

Personally, as a researcher, I’m excited to think about all the novel research questions that we will be able to tackle in this connected landscape of biodiversity data infrastructures.

Watch the full interview here: