Unlocking heritage through Open Science: digitising biodiversity and beyond with DoeDat

Meise Botanic Garden supports the principles of Open Science through DoeDat, a multilingual crowdsourcing platform. By engaging volunteer citizen scientists to transcribe labeled annotations from herbarium specimens, their historical data becomes digitally available. These enriched historical biodiversity data are then made openly available to scientific and broader communities by publishing them to our data portal botanicalcollections.be and to data aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and/or the upcoming Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) European research infrastructure.

Thanks to a growing number of close collaborations with multiple Belgian and international heritage institutions, the scope of DoeDat has extended beyond botany and even biodiversity. DoeDat volunteers can participate in digitisation projects across multiple disciplines, ranging from historical notebooks, postcards and photographs to animal identification from camera trap footage. This multidisciplinary approach fosters a broader public engagement, supports public trust in science and allows for the transcription and annotation of diverse natural and cultural heritage collections that would otherwise be impossible due to the resources needed.

DoeDat accelerates digitisation efforts and facilitates the extraction of enriched data by mobilizing an active community of volunteers. This enhances the scientific utility of collections while promoting public involvement in scientific research. The platform demonstrates the potential of citizen science to generate high-quality data and promote a positive connection between the public and scientific research.