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Waarnemingen.be - Other insect occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium

Dataset homepage

Citation

Lock K, Gielen K, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Desmet P, Swinnen K (2019). Waarnemingen.be - Other insect occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Version 1.3. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/vcaflk accessed via GBIF.org on 2020-02-21.

Description

Waarnemingen.be - Other insect occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by Natuurpunt. The dataset contains over 27,000 insect occurrences of 355 naturally occurring species (native, vagrant or migrant species), recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists), mainly since 2008. The occurrences are derived from the database http://www.waarnemingen.be, hosted at the nature conservation NGO Natuurpunt in collaboration with Stichting Natuurinformatie. Standardized information regarding the occurrence’s sex, lifeStage, reproductiveCondition, behavior, occurrenceRemarks, and samplingProtocol is included as well. The taxonomic scope of the dataset is defined by “Insects (other)”, a residual taxonomic group used at www.waarnemingen.be to indicate insect species that are not part of one of the major insect groups/orders. See Taxonomic coverage for more information regarding which insect groups are (not) included.

Generalized and/or withheld information: location information is generalized to 5 x 5 km² Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid cells. Observer name, exact XY-coordinates, toponyms, and photographs are not included in the published dataset, but are known in the source database.

To allow anyone to use this dataset, we have released the data to the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). We would appreciate however, if you read and follow these norms for data use (http://www.natuurpunt.be/normen-voor-datagebruik) and provide a link to the original dataset (https://doi.org/10.15468/vcaflk) whenever possible. If you use these data for a scientific paper, please cite the dataset following the applicable citation norms and/or consider us for co-authorship. We are always interested to provide more information or know how you have used the data, so please contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata or natuurdata@natuurpunt.be.

The publication of this dataset is supported by INBO and funded by Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) as part of the Belgian contribution to LifeWatch.

Sampling Description

Study Extent

See geographic coverage.

Sampling

The observations (species, date, location, observer) were recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists) at http://www.waarnemingen.be. The dataset also includes historical records and datasets imported in waarnemingen.be. The majority of the data are presence-only data (absence data are not included in this dataset).

Quality Control

Recorded data are constantly verified by species group specialists taking collection specimens, the observer’s species knowledge, added photographs and known species list of locations into account. The validation procedure from www.waarnemingen.be consists of an interactive procedure in which observers can be asked for additional information by a team of validators, after which the validator manually adds a validation status. Records that are not manually validated are additionally checked by an automated validation procedure that takes into account the number of manually validated observations within a specified date and distance range. 59% of the observations in this dataset are supported by photographs on www.waarnemingen.be. The validation status is indicated in the field identificationVerificationStatus, the link to the original record in references.

Method steps

  1. Not provided.

Taxonomic Coverages

The datasets contains 355 naturally occurring insect species (as well as a number of multispecies) recorded in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. This includes species that are native, vagrant or migrant. The scope is defined by “Insects (other)”, a residual taxonomic group used at www.waarnemingen.be to indicate insect species that are not part of one of the major insect groups/orders, i.e. that are not part of moths and butterflies (Lepidoptera), dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata), bees, wasps and ants (Hymenoptera), beetles (Coleoptera), flies and mosquitoes (Diptera), grasshoppers and crickets (Orthoptera) or true bugs (Hemiptera). Occurrences for some of these groups are already published as open data: butterflies (Vanreusel et al. 2016, https://doi.org/10.15468/ezfbee), grasshoppers and crickets (Lock et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.15468/ffwdxn), true bugs (Lock et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/dkd0sg), and bees, wasp and ants (D’Haeseleer et al. 2019, https://doi.org/10.15468/r0fx1v).
  1. Animalia
    common name: animals rank: kingdom
  2. Arthropoda
    rank: phylum
  3. Insecta
    common name: insects rank: class

Geographic Coverages

Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. These regions are situated in the north of Belgium and cover an area of 13,522 km² and 162 km² respectively (13,684 km² in total or 45% of the Belgian territory). Flanders is largely covered by agricultural land and urban areas while the Brussels Capital Region is mainly urban. All occurrence data are generalized to grid cells of 5 x 5 km² of the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system, with the grid codes indicated in the field verbatimCoordinates. The WGS84 centroids of these grid cells are calculated in decimalLatitude/Longitude with a coordinateUncertaintyInMeters of 3,536 meters using Wieczorek et al. (2004).

Bibliographic Citations

  1. D’Haeseleer J, Vanormelingen P, Devalez J, Verheyde F, Ravoet J, Uitterhaegen B, De Grave D, Reyniers J, Van Steenwinkel C, Muls D, Gielen K, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Desmet P, Swinnen K (2019). Waarnemingen.be - Hymenoptera occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/r0fx1v -
  2. Lock K, Foquet B, Foquet R, Lambrechts J, Adriaens T, Gielen K, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Desmet P, Swinnen K (2017). Waarnemingen.be - Orthoptera occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/ffwdxn -
  3. Lock K, Chérot F, Libeer R, Claerebout S, Aukema B, Verhoeyen K, Uitterhaegen B, Gielen K, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Desmet P, Swinnen K (2018). Waarnemingen.be - Hemiptera occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/dkd0sg -
  4. Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Vantieghem P, Gielen K, Desmet P, Swinnen K (2016). Waarnemingen.be - Butterfly occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/ezfbee -
  5. Wieczorek J, Guo QG, Hijmans RJ (2004) The point-radius method for georeferencing locality descriptions and calculating associated uncertainty. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 18: 745–767. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658810412331280211 -

Contacts

Koen Lock
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: koen_lock@hotmail.com
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
Karin Gielen
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: karin.gielen@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
Wouter Vanreusel
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: wouter.vanreusel@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
Marc Herremans
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: marc.herremans@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
Peter Desmet
originator
Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO)
BE
email: peter.desmet@inbo.be
userId: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8442-8025
Kristijn Swinnen
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: kristijn.swinnen@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
userId: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1910-9247
originator
all insect observers
BE
homepage: http://www.waarnemingen.be
Kristijn Swinnen
metadata author
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: kristijn.swinnen@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
userId: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1910-9247
Peter Desmet
metadata author
Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO)
BE
email: peter.desmet@inbo.be
userId: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8442-8025
Marc Herremans
administrative point of contact
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: marc.herremans@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be
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