A 92 hectares botanical garden with living collections, seed banks, preserved specimens, a virtual herbarium, and high-quality infrastructure.
Meise Botanic Garden
The history of the Meise Botanic Garden dates back to 1796, therefore it has an experience with plants of more than two centuries. The Botanic Garden comprises of 92 hectares with a lot of historic buildings and is located near Brussels.
Its collections are incredibly varied and contain a wealth of information on the diversity of plants: living collections, seed bank, preserved specimens (herbarium specimens, fluid-preserved collections, slides, tissue collections, etc., in total ca. 4 million specimens), a library with a botanical reference collection, and archives documenting the history of the institute and its collections.
In order to make them more accessible, large parts of its collections and research data are available digitally through collection portals and research databases (see their list of databases).
It has helped to compile the Atlas of the Flora, a comprehensive book detailing the habitat, ecology and distribution of all plants in the of Flanders and Brussels Regions.
In addition, the Botanic Garden has a high-quality infrastructure to support its research, including herbarium digitization equipment, bright-field microscopes, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), a digital microscope with a large depth-of-field (Keyence vhx-5000) and a fully equipped molecular lab. This research infrastructure is supported by an excellent technical and computing staff. A dedicated team of botanical illustrators collaborates with our researchers to illustrate plant biodiversity.
Creation date: 1796
Access & costs: Please contact the responsible of the collection you would like to visit (see the list of contact persons below).
Links:
- Website: www.plantentuinmeise.be
- Virtual herbarium: www.botanicalcollections.be
- Library Catalogue: http://vubis-web.plantentuinmeise.be/webopac/Vubis.csp?
- Flore d'Afrique centrale: www.floredafriquecentrale.be/#/en/home
- Citizen science platform: www.doedat.be
Contacts:
- For general queries about collections: Piet Stoffelen, piet.stoffelen@plantentuinmeise.be
- For preserved collections: Ann Bogaerts, ann.bogaerts@plantentuinmeise.be
- For IT infrastructure: Quentin Groom, quentin.groom@plantentuinmeise.be
- For research: Frederik Leliaert, frederik.leliaert@plantentuinmeise.be
- For Living Collections: elke.bellefroid@plantentuinmeise.be
- For the Seed Bank: Filip.vandelook@plantentuinmeise.be
- For the Library: Nicole.Hanquart@plantentuinmeise.be
- For the Flora of Central Africa: Marc.Sosef@plantentuinmeise.be