Meise Botanic Garden

Meise Botanic Garden (MeiseBG) is the coordinator of DiSSCo Flanders.
It is an internationally renowned centre of excellence for collection-based plant research and conservation and contributes with its know-how in both physical and digital collection management.

It hosts about 4 million preserved items, among which about 3.1Mio herbarium sheets of vascular plants, 0.35Mio fungi including lichens, 0.4Mio bryological and 0.15Mio algal collections. The outdoor (92 ha) and indoor living collections comprise over 25K accessions from about 17K plant taxa from around the globe, including numerous rare and endangered species that are cultivated for research and conservation and important wild relatives of coffee and bananas with high economical importance. The seed bank of MeiseBG conserves more than 6.6K accessions, notably of endangered Belgian flora, the endemic plants of the Copper Hills in Katanga and a unique collection of wild beans and bananas.

There are over 10K DNA extracts and 25K cryopreserved collections stored for molecular analyses. MeiseBG is mass digitizing its entire preserved collection of herbarium sheets in the framework of the DOE! project financed by the Flemish government. Citizens contribute to mobilise additional collection data through the crowdsourcing platform DOEDAT. MeiseBG staff is expert in collection management, biodiversity information standards and active member of TDWG.