François Le Coze was awarded the WoRMS Early Career Researchers. This award was handed out for the second time and is intended to recognize the effort of a scientist who has contributed to WoRMS significantly.
François has been an editor of WoRMS since Oct 2016 and has undoubtedly been THE most active editor for WoRMS since that date. In just 18 months he has single-handedly added or edited 29,000 taxon entries, making him the 10th most prolific editor of all time. 40% of his edits were entries of new taxa, all added individually and not as bulk uploads and the remaining 60% have been edits of existing entries – adding more data, adding type species, linking and adding literature references and adding a few images. The award was presented during the 5th World Conference of Marine Biodiversity (Canada, Montreal, 16 May 2018)

 

Also, the WoRMS Achievement Award was awarded to Geoff Read for the major and very detailed contributions he has made to WoRMS in the past years, and his input & constructive feedback during his time on the Steering Committee. Geoff is one of the editors that have always been given positive & constructive feedback on the work of the DMT, and has been very helpful in identifying technical issues and helping to work towards good solutions. He is the driving force behind The World Polychaeta Database (http://www.marinespecies.org/polychaeta) and one of the (chief) editors taking on a communication role towards his community through Twitter (he has 1052 followers) and is a source of tweet-inspirations for WoRMS too. In 2015, he rose the idea of joining forces with other worm-editors, to create an AnnelidaBase (in analogy with MolluscaBase) and to work across environments during this exercise, so including marine and non-marine taxa and involving the relevant experts. In 2017 he led a LifeWatch-WoRMS workshop to bring all these editors together and to discuss the actions needed to launch AnnelidaBase. The award was presented during the 5th World Conference of Marine Biodiversity (Canada, Montreal, 16 May 2018).