Maarten Trekels

• MSc
• Biodiversity data scientist at Meise Botanic Garden

The DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) Flanders consortium, with one of the set goals being "maturing" (i.e., optimizing the management of) and unlocking (i.e., publishing) their DNA collections, identified 1) the need for actively sharing best practices on the management of DNA collections; and 2) a need for guidance on how to b...

DNA collections are a valuable type of Natural Science collection, enabling the validation of past research, serving as a source for new genomic studies and supporting ex situ conservation. The DiSSCo Flanders DNA collection working group, aiming to advance and "unlock" their DNA collections, identified the need for: 1) actively sharing best practi...

Effective management of natural science collections is crucial to maximizing their scientific value. They often contain invaluable items like type specimens and reference material, and data that contributes significantly to our understanding of biodiversity, ecology, and evolution. Research institutes often harbor several smaller collections, which...

The DoeDat platform was launched by Meise Botanic Garden in 2018 to capture label data from imaged herbarium specimens by inviting volunteer contributors (Groom et al. 2018). It has since facilitated data capture from specimens of other natural history collections (Helminger et al. 2020, Mitrache et al. 2023), as well as digitised content from vari...

This investigation uses biodiversity data cubes derived from the datasets mobilised by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), to conduct an analysis of sex ratios of ducks across Europe. Encompassing over 4 million occurrences extracted from nearly 5000 datasets, this study elucidates sex distribution patterns across various species,...

This Data Management Plan outlines a comprehensive strategy for handling, storing, and sharing of data generated by digitisation projects of the herbarium at Meise Botanic Garden with Index Herbarium code BR. Its purpose is to establish clear guidelines for both staff and external users, specifying the terms governing data usage and storage. It aim...

The WorldFAIR Case Study on Agricultural Biodiversity (WP10) addresses the challenges of advancing interoperability and mobilising plant-pollinator interactions data for reuse. Previous efforts, reported in Deliverable 10.1 - from our discovery phase - provided an overview of projects, best practices, tools, and examples for creating, managing and...

Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online over the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is...

Societal Impact Statement Primary occurrence data ( ‘ what, where, when ’ ) enable study of species distribution and diversity, facilitating reactions to societal challenges from food security to climate change mitigation. Scientific names integrate information and are made concrete through reference to a type specimen. Research and conservation pl...

Latimer Core (LtC) is a new proposed Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) data standard that supports the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass (Woodburn et al. 2022). It is designed to be applicable to a range of use...

Effective biodiversity management and policy decisions require timely access to accurate and reliable information on biodiversity status, trends, and threats. However, the process of data cleaning, aggregation, and analysis is often time-consuming, convoluted, laborious, and irreproducible. Biodiversity monitoring across large areas faces challenge...

Although pollination is an essential ecosystem service that sustains life on Earth, data on this vital process is largely scattered or unavailable, limiting our understanding of the current state of pollinators and hindering effective actions for their conservation and sustainable management. In addition to the well-known challenges of biodiversity...

Abstract: Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online in the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. Whilst image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applicatio...

The BiCIKL project is born from a vision that biodiversity data are most useful if they are presented as a network of data that can be integrated and viewed from different starting points. BiCIKL’s goal is to realise that vision by linking biodiversity data infrastructures, particularly for literature, molecular sequences, specimens, nomenclature a...

Biodiversity is a data-intensive science and relies on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth (Bowker 2000). The ability to integrate such data from different disciplines, geographic regions and scales is crucial for making better decisions towards sustainable de...

DiSSCo Flanders aims at developing a standardised natural science collections management infrastructure, ensuring proper long-term conservation, and future re-usage of the collections. Meise Botanic Garden coordinates the Flemish consortium. This four-year project, funded by the FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders), started in January 2021. The con...

Natural history collections play a pivotal role in taxonomy, which in turn supports all of biology, but particularly conservation and biodiversity policy. However, to provide this role, it is necessary to know what specimens are stored where, and how complete the collection is. The biodiversity held within collections globally remains uncertain, wi...

The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging...

At least 29% of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems have been significantly modified by human activity (Ellis 2011). Total livestock biomass is 15 times greater than that of wild mammals (Bar-On et al. 2018). Crops such as maize, soybean, rice, and wheat cover 23% of available agricultural land (Ritchie and Roser 2013). Even where land is not farmed...

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection...

We took data on the collectors of specimens from natural history collections. Co-collectors of specimens were extracted from the data and a network of co-collection was constructed. This network was used to analyze the age and gender balance of collectors and how this has changed with time. Men outnumber women in the network, but women participatio...

The BiCIKL Project is born from a vision that biodiversity data are most useful if they are viewed as a network of data that can be integrated and viewed from different starting points. BiCIKL’s goal is to realize that vision by linking biodiversity data infrastructures, particularly for literature, molecular sequences, specimens, nomenclature and...

There are an estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species globally and knowledge of those organisms is organised about their scientific names and the specimens we have of those species (Sweetlove 2011, Mora et al. 2011). Likewise there are between 1.2 and 2.1 billion (10 ⁹ ) specimens held in biodiversity collections globally (Ariño 2010). These collec...

The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woo...

Many institutions harbor living collections in the form of living plants, animals, microrganisms or seeds. In the framework of the TDWG collections and specimen descriptions standards, it has become important to align exisiting standards for living collections and specimens or to identify where concepts or controlled vocabularies would be needed in...

When sequencing molecules from an organism it is standard practice to create voucher specimens. This ensures that the results are repeatable and that the identification of the organism can be verified. It also means that the sequence data can be linked to a whole host of other data related to the specimen, including traits, other sequences, environ...

Digitisation and publication of museum specimen data is happening worldwide, but far from complete. Museums can start by sharing what they know about their holdings at a higher level, long before each object has its own record. Information about what is held in collections worldwide is needed by many stakeholders including collections managers, fun...

Data standards allow us to aggregate, compare, compute and communicate data from a wide variety of origins. However, for historical reasons, data are most likely to be stored in many different formats and conform to different models. Every data set might contain a huge amount of information, but it becomes tremendously difficult to compare them wit...

Discussions about the need to document and describe collections at a gross level have been in progress for at least two decades. The original form was the 2008 Natural Collection Description (NCD), which was never ratified. Although a number of implementations were set up using it, it was by and large, acknowledged to be cumbersome and out-of-date...

The SYNTHESYS consortium has been operational since 2004, and has facilitated physical access by individual researchers to European natural history collections through virtual access to collections through digitisation, with two calls for the programme, the first in 2020 and the second in 2021. The Virtual Access (VA) programme is not a direct digi...

γ−Fe and related alloys are model systems of the coupling between structure and magnetism in solids. Since different electronic states (with different volumes and magnetic ordering states) are closely spaced in energy, small perturbations can alter which one is the actual ground state. Here, we demonstrate that the ferromagnetic state of γ−Fe nanop...

We describe an experimental setup for conversion electron Mössbauer spectroscopy (CEMS) at low temperature. The setup is composed of a continuous flow cryostat (temperature range of 4.2-500 K), detector housing, three channel electron multipliers, and corresponding electronics. We demonstrate the capabilities of the setup with CEMS measurements per...

To unravel the effects of phonon confinement, the influence of size and morphology on the atomic vibrations is investigated in Sn nanoislands and cluster-assembled films. Nuclear resonant inelastic x-ray scattering is used to probe the phonon densities of states of the Sn nanostructures which show significant broadening of the features compared to...

A highly active Sn site with Lewis acid properties is identified in post-synthetically synthesized Sn/DeAl? catalyst, prepared by liquid phase Sn grafting of a dealuminated beta zeolite. Though apparently similar Sn active site structures have been reported for the post-synthetic and the conventional hydrothermal Sn?, detailed study of the electron...

The coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism is investigated in granular Sn–Co nanocomposites. The nanocomposites have been prepared by co-deposition of Sn atoms and Co clusters, the morphology and composition of which can be tuned by varying the deposition rate of Co clusters relative to Sn atoms. Flat isolated Sn islands are obtained a...

Lewis acid Snβ-type zeolites with varying amounts of Brønsted acid Al in the framework were synthesized using a simple two-step procedure comprising partial dealumination of β zeolite under action of acid, followed by grafting with SnCl4·5H2O in dry isopropanol. Characterization of the thus-prepared Al-containing Snβ (Sn/pDeAlβ) zeolites with ICP,...

Composite multiferroics are a new class of material where magneto-electric coupling is achieved by creating an interface between a ferromagnetic and a ferroelectric compound. The challenge of understanding the chemical and magnetic properties of such interface is a key to achieve good magneto-electric coupling. The unique possibilities offered by i...

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.88.159903

We investigate the link between superconductivity and atomic vibrations in Nb3Sn films with a thickness ranging from 10 to 50 nm. The challenge of measuring the phonon density of states (PDOS) of these films has been tackled by employing the technique of nuclear inelastic scattering by 119Sn isotopes to reveal the Sn-partial phonon density of state...

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.139901

The Pippard coherence length ξ0 (the size of a Cooper pair) in two extreme type-I superconductors (In and Sn) was determined directly through high-resolution measurement of the nonlocal electrodynamic effect combining low-energy muon spin rotation spectroscopy and polarized neutron reflectometry. The renormalization factor Z=mcp*/2m (mcp* and m are...

We present an approach to probe the magnetization inside superconducting films using ultrathin 57Fe probe layers excited by synchrotron radiation. We investigate the evolution of the 57Fe hyperfine field orientation as a function of magnetic field above and below the superconducting transition temperature Tc for a Nb(50 nm)/57Fe(0.6 nm)/Nb(50 nm) t...

Bring in the cleaner! Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are able to separate nitrogen and sulfur contaminants from fuel, which may lead to the production of cleaner fuels (see picture; ppmw=parts per million by weight). The separation ability is shown to originate from the Lewis acidity of the metal sites in the MOFs.

We studied the exchange-spring behavior in FePt-Fe hard-soft magnetic heterostructures. We present a study of the spin structure of the soft Fe layer of Fe-FePt bilayers by nuclear forward scattering of synchrotron radiation. The orientation of the Fe moments close to the top of the soft layer was determined quantitatively as a function of the soft...