The "COBECORE" Team

The "Leaf Prints" project is an initiative of Meise Botanic Garden and part of the COBECORE ( “Congo basin eco-climatological data recovery and valorisation") project which brings together an interdisciplinary network of partners with the objective to establish baseline measurements necessary in long-term (retrospective) ecological and climatological research by valorising unexplored historical data. Please, visit our project website for more details on the COBECORE project and its team members: http://cobecore.org/team/

The "Leaf Prints" Team

Sofie Meeus is researcher at Meise Botanic Garden and the coordinator of the "Leaf Prints" project. As she is based in Meise Botanic Garden she has access to one of the largest herbarium collections in the world from which she selects interesting plant specimens from the Congo basin tropical rain forest. She is interested in comparing recent and historical plant samples in their functional traits, especially in their stomatal densities and sizes.

Koen Hufkens (https://khufkens.com/) is the lead on the "COBECORE" project. He successfully ran the "Jungle Rhythms" project on Zooniverse (http://junglerhythms.org/) which aimed to transcribe old observations of tree life cycle events (flowering, leaf shedding, fruit dispersion) which are key to understanding tree functioning.

Preparing the microscope images from dried plant material

Martine Borremans is a volunteer in Meise Botanic Garden. She collects herbarium specimens in the collection and uses the nail polish method to make impressions of the leaf surface, the so-called leaf prints.

Guy L. Borin is also a volunteer in the garden. He makes microscope images of the leaf prints using a digital microscope.

Automation of stomatal measurements

Francis wyffels is Professor of Robotics & Artificial Intelligence at the IDLab of Ghent University (Belgium). He is responsible for developing the deep learning models with the data generated in this project.

Jan Van den Bulcke is Professor in the field of sustainable primary production at UGent-Woodlab (Belgium). He will oversee the proper use of the data in scientific analyses and help in generating relevant results for the environmental community and policy makers based on the dataset generated by Leaf Prints and COBECORE as a whole.