Publications

The Cladophoraceae (Cladophorales) includes branched (Cladophora) and unbranched (Chaetomorpha and Rhizoclonium) filamentous species, living in marine and freshwater environments. Species-level taxonomy is impeded by considerable morphological plasticity, related to environmental conditions, and switches between branched and unbranched morphologies have been reported within species. In this work, it was shown that Cladophora surera, a species ...

Species diversity of Ulva in Vietnam was investigated using three commonly used genetic markers, the nuclear encoded rDNA ITS region and the plastid encoded rbcL and tufA genes. Single locus species delimitation methods, complemented with morphological and ecological information resulted in the delimitation of 19 species. This diversity is largely incongruent with the traditional understanding of Ulva diversity in Vietnam. Only four species ...

The paper summarises many years of discussions and experience of biodiversity publishers, organisations, research projects and individual researchers, and proposes recommendations for implementation of persistent identifiers for article metadata, structural elements (sections, subsections, figures, tables, references, supplementary materials and others) and data specific to biodiversity (taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, taxon names, ...

The green seaweed Ulva is important from ecological and economic perspectives, but the identification of species is often problematic. Here we assessed and discussed different perspectives to establish a stable taxonomic framework for Ulva, which will benefit both ecological and applied research. We evaluated (1) the performance of commonly used DNA-barcode markers (ITS rDNA, rbcL, and tufA) using species delimitation methods (PTP and GMYC), (2) ...

The landscape of biodiversity data infrastructures and organisations is complex and fragmented. Many occupy specialised niches representing narrow segments of the multidimensional biodiversity informatics space, while others operate across a broad front but differ from others by data type(s) handled, their geographic scope and the life cycle phase(s) of the data they support. In an effort to characterise the various dimensions of the ...

This joint statement aims at encouraging all authors, publishers and editors involved in scientific publishing to give the bibliographic source of the authorities of taxonomic names. This initiative, written by members of the three communities, has been approved by the executive boards of the SPNHC (Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections), CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) and BHL (Biodiversity Heritage ...

At present many herbaria and musea around the globe are digitising their natural history collections. Capturing the label information on these specimens is crucial to finding these specimens and using their data. To this end, Meise Botanic Garden chose to record minimal data as part of its second mass digitization project. The collections digitized, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, are diverse and poorly curated. Diversity of ...

Recent advances in molecular biomonitoring open new horizons for aquatic ecosystem assessment. Rapid and cost-effective methods based on organismal DNA or environmental DNA (eDNA) now offer the opportunity to produce inventories of indicator taxa that can subsequently be used to assess biodiversity and ecological quality. However, the integration of these new DNA-based methods into current monitoring practices is not straightforward, and will ...

The second mass digitization project at the Meise Botanic Garden (Belgium), DOE2, finished in 2021. Most of the label transcription was done by a contracted third party. Despite the data being delivered at a quality controlled high standard, extensive data cleaning was still needed before it could be imported into our database. The poor data quality was the result of four main factors: (1) the herbarium being digitized is not as well curated as ...

The Herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden (BR) is in the top 15 herbaria worldwide. The collection comprises some 4 million specimens, which are important for scientific research. Digitisation of specimens includes imaging, transcription of label information, linking data and making the results publically accessible online. In addition to facilitating researchers’ access to specimens, digitisation also brings new possibilities for analysis and ...