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Doctor Molmou
🎓 On Friday 23 January 2026, Denise Molmou successfully defended her PhD thesis on floristics and ethnobotany. Her outstanding work documents 399 useful plant species in her home country, Guinea, and analyses their distribution, uses, and potential threats. Her PhD project was a collaboration between the National Herbarium of Guinea, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Ghent University, and was funded by the Ellis Goodman Family Foundation, the Government of the Republic of Guinea, and Rio Tinto.
Recognised among the 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining in 2024, Denise is an exceptional conservationist and a prolific scientist. Her thesis powerfully highlights the urgent need for community-based conservation action to address threats to Guinea’s remarkable plant diversity. We are confident that Denise will continue to bring tremendous energy, commitment, and leadership to this vital cause.
Herbarium digitization started
The start of the academic year, 22 September 2025, also marks a new chapter in the long life of the herbarium of the GUM - Gents Universiteitsmuseum & Plantentuin at Ghent University.
Thanks to funding from Interreg North-West Europe (NWE), we’ve begun digitizing our 300,000 plant specimens, preserving centuries of botanical knowledge for the digital age.
We’re thrilled to be part of DigiHerb, a project that’s opening up the treasures of three medium-sized European herbaria:
🌱 The National Botanic Gardens of Ireland (leading the project)
🌱 The Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe, Germany
🌱 And ours, right here in Ghent!
🇪🇺 Together, we’re making history. It’s the first time in the EU that herbarium collections from multiple countries are being made available through a unified digital portal and data management system.
🤜🏼🤛🏼 Over the next seven months, our conveyor belt will be running non-stop, led by our freshly graduated biologists Berdien Daniels, Felix Heyman and Silas Art, supported by our amazing GUM volunteers, all under the supervision of Kenneth Bauters.
🎯 For us, unlocking the capsules that herbarium specimens are has long been a dream. We believe knowledge should be shared, and that digitization is one way to make it happen. It won’t erase the injustices rooted in colonial history surrounding herbarium collections, but it’s a step toward a more open and equitable future. In seven months, the origins of the material will be acknowledged, and the stories these specimens tell - about species, traits, habitats, and climates - will be freely accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, through this site and GBIF: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility. 🌍
