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

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 (including professionals) 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. 13.9% 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.

The datasets contains 41 naturally occurring Orthoptera 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.

1. Animalia
   common name: animals rank: kingdom
2. Arthropoda
   rank: phylum
3. Insecta
   common name: insects rank: class
4. Orthoptera
   common name: grashoppers & crickets rank: order

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.