In its sixth edition, the WoRMS Early Career Research Award goes to Tristan Verhoeff. Following the completion of his PhD on gene regulation and epigenetics in cancer at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2022, Tristan is now active as a research associate with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. He conducts valuable work on the identification and systematics of marine invertebrates, with a focus on cephalopods and brachiopods. Since the start of 2023, he is a Taxonomic editor at WoRMS for the Brachiopoda. During his young career at WoRMS, Tristan already added and edited close to 2200 taxon pages.

The 2023 WoRMS Achievement Award was presented to Peter Schuchert, one of our senior Hydrozoa editors. Peter’s scientific expertise includes the systematics and phylogeny of Hydrozoa. Since the start of his involvement as an editor in 2009, he has actively maintained and updated the Hydrozoa (polyps and jellyfish) - especially from the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean and New Zealand, for the World Hydrozoa Database. During his fruitful career as a WoRMS editor, Peter so far added and edited over 9400 taxon pages.

With these awards, we highlight our deep appreciation for all the hard work that has been done by Tristan on the World Brachiopoda Database, and by Peter on the World Hydrozoa Database in WoRMS. 

The WoRMS Early Career Researcher Award and the WoRMS Achievement Award are supported by LifeWatch, the E-Science European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research. LifeWatch is a distributed virtual laboratory, which is being used for different aspects of biodiversity research. VLIZ is also responsible for building the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone, to which WoRMS and its sub-registers are a valuable contribution. WoRMS is an endorsed project action under the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (UN Ocean Decade).