Sabine von Mering

Sabine von Mering is a Biological Data Scientist at the Museum of Natural History Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on opening up and connecting natural history collections with particular attention to collection agents, including marginalized groups, research expeditions, and linked entities such as objects, localities, publications, and archival material.

Her research spans biodiversity informatics, data science applications in natural history collections, plant systematics (particularly of plant families like Caryophyllaceae and Juncaginaceae), and the ethical dimensions of collection management. Dr. von Mering is particularly known for her work on making collection data more accessible through linked open data standards and for her research on the historical context of collections, including colonial-era collecting practices.

• Opening up and linking type catalogues in Wikidata
• Wikidata for Botanists and Linked Open Data
• Research on women honored in plant genera
• Provenance research on collections from colonial contexts
• Community curation of research expeditions data

She actively contributes to several major initiatives including the Collectors project, the FIND working group (Women in natural history), and the international WOMNH network. She also participates in the TDWG Task Group on Modelling Research Expeditions and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) initiative.

Dr. von Mering's scientific work demonstrates a strong commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and the application of modern data science techniques to traditional natural history questions. She has made significant contributions to understanding taxonomic relationships within plant families and to developing better data models for representing the complex histories of museum collections.