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

Citation

Description

Waarnemingen.be - Plant occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by Natuurpunt and described (v1.4) in Steeman et al. (2017, https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.85.14925). The dataset contains over 2.3 million plant occurrences of almost 1,300 naturally occurring species (native, vagrant or migrant species), recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists), mainly since 2008. Together with the datasets Van Landuyt & Brosens (2017, http://www.gbif.org/dataset/271c444f-f8d8-4986-b748-e7367755c0c1) and Van Landuyt & Noé (2015, https://doi.org/10.15468/xnlbke), the dataset represents the most complete overview of indigenous plants in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region (north Belgium). 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, reproductiveCondition, behavior, occurrenceRemarks, and samplingProtocol is included as well.

Generalized and/or withheld information: location information is generalized to 4 x 4 km² IFBL 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/fyuklz) 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.

Purpose

Plants have a long history of being recorded by both amateur and professional botanists. Volunteer data from amateur botanists were always an important source of distribution data of plants. The atlas of Flanders and the Brussels Capital region (Van Landuyt et al. 2006) was based on the teamwork of many volunteer botanists, NGOs, scientific institutes and governmental organisations. Since Natuurpunt, the largest nature conservation NGO in Flanders, Belgium, launched the web portal waarnemingen.be in 2008, the number of plant observations in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region has risen sharply. Beside IFBL-mapping and project-related observations, this database is easily used for occasional observations and can be used for monitoring (wildlife) areas. Old notebooks and reports were screened and stored in the database (Steeman et al. 2012). The team of specialized validators motivates the inexperienced observers and validates observations. Here we publish these records on a IFBL (Instituut voor Floristiek van België en Luxemburg) grid cell resolution of 4 × 4 km².

Sampling Description

Taxonomic Coverages

Geographic Coverages

Bibliographic Citations

1. Steeman R, Vanreusel W, Barendse R, Verloove F, Wysmantel N, Van den Bussche W, Gyselinck T, Hendrickx P, Zwaenepoel A, Van Vooren P, Jacobs S, Desmet P, Gielen K, Herremans M, Swinnen K (2017) Waarnemingen.be – Plant occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. PhytoKeys 85: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.85.14925 -
2. APG II (2003) An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG II. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 141: 399–436. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1095-8339.2003.t01-1-00158.x -
3. Steeman R, Vervoort L, Lambrechts J (2012) Actualisatie Provinciale Prioritaire plantensoorten en aanzet voor de ‘hotspotkaart van de bedreigde plantensoorten in Vlaams-Brabant’. Rapport Natuurpunt Studie 10: 1–51. -
4. Van der Meijden R (2005) Heukels’ Flora van Nederland, 23th print, Wolters Noordhoff. -
5. Van Landuyt W, Noé N (2015) Belgian IFBL Flora Checklists (1939–1971). Belgium Biodiversity Platform. Dataset/Occurrence. https://doi.org/10.15468/xnlbke -
6. Van Landuyt W, Brosens D (2017) Florabank1 – A grid-based database on vascular plant distribution in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders and the Brussels Capital region). Version 45.6. Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). Dataset/Occurrence. http://www.gbif.org/dataset/271c444f-f8d8-4986-b748-e7367755c0c1 Data paper: https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.12.2849 -
7. Van Landuyt W, Hoste I, Vanhecke L, Van den Bremt P, Vercruysse W, De Beer D (2006) Atlas van de Flora van Vlaanderen en het Brussels Gewest. Instituut voor Natuur- en Bosonderzoek: Brussel: Belgium. -
8. 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 -