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

Wouter Vanreusel; Karin Gielen; Tom Van den Neucker; Robert Jooris; Peter Desmet

doi:10.15468/7reil0

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

Citation

Vanreusel W, Gielen K, Van den Neucker T, Jooris R, Desmet P (2021). Waarnemingen.be - Fish occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Version 1.7. Natuurpunt. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/7reil0 accessed via GBIF.org on 2025-05-16.

Description

Waarnemingen.be - Fish occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by Natuurpunt. The dataset contains over 16,000 fish (Actinopterygii, Cephalaspidomorphi, Chondrichthyes, Leptocardii) occurrences of 132 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, behavior, occurrenceRemarks, and samplingProtocol is included as well.

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/10.15468/7reil0) 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. These consist of a mixture of casual observations of living and dead fish, and catches by different methods.

Quality Control

Recorded data are constantly verified by fish experts taking the observer’s species knowledge, added photographs and known species list of locations into account. The validation procedure from 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. 16% of the observations in this dataset are supported by a photograph on waarnemingen.be. The validation status is indicated in the field identificationVerificationStatus, the link to the original record in references.

Method steps

Not provided.

Taxonomic Coverages

The dataset contains 132 naturally occurring fish (Actinopterygii, Cephalaspidomorphi, Elasmobranchii, Leptocardii) species (as well as a number of subspecies, formas and multispecies) recorded in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. This includes species that are native, vagrant or migrant. The class Actinopterygii is best represented in this dataset (113 species), in addition to 15 Elasmobranchii (Amblyraja hyperborea, Cetorhinus maximus, Dasyatis pastinaca, Lamna nasus, Leucoraja naevus, Mustelus asterias, Mustelus mustelus, Raja brachyura, Raja clavata, Raja microocellata, Raja montagui, Raja radiata, Raja undulata, Scyliorhinus canicula, Scyliorhinus stellaris), three Cephalaspidomorphi (Lampetra fluviatilis, Lampetra planeri, Petromyzon marinus) and one Leptocardii (Branchiostoma lanceolatum).

Animalia
common name: animals rank: kingdom
Chordata
rank: phylum
Actinopterygii
common name: ray-finned fishes rank: class
Elasmobranchii
common name: sharks, rays, skates & sawfish rank: class
Cephalaspidomorphi
common name: Lampreys rank: class
Leptocardii
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

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

Wouter Vanreusel
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: wouter.vanreusel@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be

Karin Gielen
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: karin.gielen@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be

Tom Van den Neucker
originator
University of Antwerp, Department of Biology, Ecosystem Management Research Group
BE
email: tom.vandenneucker@uantwerpen.be

Robert Jooris
originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
email: robert.jooris@telenet.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

originator
all fish observers
BE
homepage: http://www.waarnemingen.be

Wouter Vanreusel
metadata author
Natuurpunt
BE
email: wouter.vanreusel@natuurpunt.be
homepage: http://www.natuurpunt.be

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