Awardees for the 2025 WoRMS Achievement & Early Career Researcher Award known
This year, Sammy De Grave has been honored with the WoRMS Achievement Award, and the WoRMS Early Career Researcher Award goes to Sávio Gabriel Gomes Pereira.
The 8th WoRMS Early Career Researchers Award goes to Sávio Gabriel Gomes Pereira. Sávio, an undergraduate student, has been part of the WoRMS editorial team since last year and has made contributions in adding and editing the taxa, images and sources in the World Ostracoda Database (WOD), despite being a student. Sávio's passion for taxonomy and his contributions to updating Aphia are highly appreciated.
The 9th WoRMS Achievement Award was presented to Sammy De Grave in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the WoRMS editorial team. Since joining in 2010, Sammy has entered, edited, and checked over 73,000 taxon names, and the total number of records he has modified is close to 100,000. Notably, Sammy almost single-handedly cleaned the entire backbone of the Decapoda database, a monumental project that took him 4-5 years to complete. Following this, he initiated the setup and launch of the WoRMS subportal DecaNet, where he serves as the lead editor. Together with a team of 17 editors, DecaNet is updated almost daily. Currently, the portal contains over 22,000 names, with approximately 17,500 being valid. This comprehensive dataset has proven to be invaluable to the broader decapod community.
With these awards, we highlight our deep appreciation for all the hard work that has been done by Sávio on the World Ostracoda Database, and by Sammy on the Decapoda 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).
The 9th WoRMS Achievement Award was presented to Sammy De Grave in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the WoRMS editorial team. Since joining in 2010, Sammy has entered, edited, and checked over 73,000 taxon names, and the total number of records he has modified is close to 100,000. Notably, Sammy almost single-handedly cleaned the entire backbone of the Decapoda database, a monumental project that took him 4-5 years to complete. Following this, he initiated the setup and launch of the WoRMS subportal DecaNet, where he serves as the lead editor. Together with a team of 17 editors, DecaNet is updated almost daily. Currently, the portal contains over 22,000 names, with approximately 17,500 being valid. This comprehensive dataset has proven to be invaluable to the broader decapod community.
With these awards, we highlight our deep appreciation for all the hard work that has been done by Sávio on the World Ostracoda Database, and by Sammy on the Decapoda 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).
