Community

Where do we come from?

In 2023, the International Sedge Society, coordinated by Dr Isabel Larridon from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew, UK) and Dr Pedro Jiménez Mejías from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO; Seville, Spain) became the Taxonomic Expert Network for the plant family Cyperaceae as part of the World Flora Online (WFO) project.

To ensure the success of this initiative, Dr Jiménez Mejías and Dr Larridon developed the iSedge project which aims to build an online portal hosting a worldwide taxonomic treatment for Cyperaceae, and to make this biodiversity knowledge available in an integrative, appealing and dynamic way in collaboration with colleagues from the International Sedge Society.

In 2024, the iSedge project, led by Dr Jiménez Mejías at UPO, was funded by TETTRIs (€196,483.53, Successful allocation of Є1.8 million funding - TETTRIs ) focussed on the species-rich plant family Cyperaceae overall, and by the Ministry of Science and Innovation in Spain (€199,863.10) focussed on the megadiverse genus Carex, which alone already includes >2000 plant species. A key partner in the iSedge project is the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ, Belgium) who developed the Aphia/WoRMS platform on which the “SedgeBase” online portal will be hosted.

On 15 and 16 February 2024, the start-up workshop for the iSedge project took place at the Flanders Marine Institute.

On 27 June 2024, the iSedge team, WoRMS/VLIZ and WFO signed a Memorandum of Understanding to ensure that the biodiversity knowledge compiled during the iSedge project will be shared not only on the Aphia/WoRMS platform but also on the WFO website https://www.worldfloraonline.org. This Memorandum of Understanding also contributes to the continued development of the LifeWatch Belgium Species Information Backbone (LW-SpIBB) and is part of the E-Science European LifeWatch Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch ERIC). The aim of these projects is to bring together taxonomic and species-related data, thereby filling the gaps in our knowledge and reducing duplication of efforts, in parallel with the TETTRIs project.

On 16th July 2024, the Global Cyperaceae Database became available online: http://cyperaceae.org/.

On 22 July 2024, as part of the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, a workshop will be organised to share the project aims and workflows with the International Sedge Society members and the wider scientific community who are interested in contributing to the iSedge project or Sedgebase portal.