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

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 612,934 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Please be aware, this is an old version of the dataset.  Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Vantieghem P, Gielen K, Vlinderwerkgroep Natuurpunt, all butterfly recorders (2016): Waarnemingen.be - Butterfly occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Natuurpunt. Dataset/Occurrence. http://doi.org/10.15468/ezfbee Data paper: http://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.585.8019

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Natuurpunt. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 1f968e89-ca96-4065-91a5-4858e736b5aa.  Natuurpunt publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Belgian Biodiversity Platform.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation; butterflies; Lepidoptera; distribution; collection; literature; citizen science; observations; monitoring

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. These regions cover an area of 13,522 km² and 162 km² respectively (13,684 km² in total). This area is situated in the northern of Belgium and represents 45% of the Belgian territory. Flanders is largely covered by agricultural land and urban areas while the Brussels Capital Region is mainly urban. All distribution data were attributed to grid cells of 5 x 5 km² of the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection. The centroids of the 5 x 5 km² grid cells were calculated using the WGS84 projection with a coordinateUncertaintyInMeters of 3,769 meters (Wieczorek et al. 2004). In total, Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region cover 638 (622 with records) and 9 (all nine with records) grid cells, respectively. The grid cells without records only cover a very small area within Flanders.

Taxonomic Coverage

The datasets covers 49 of the 67 indigenous as well as 3 regular migrant butterfly species (Colias croceus, C. hyale, and Vanessa cardui). Aporia crataegi, Argynnis adippe, and Argynnis aglaja no longer have breeding populations in Flanders and recent observations are all considered as vagrant individuals in this dataset. 8 vagrant species with photographic evidence, that most likely spontaneously reached Flanders (Apatura ilia, Brenthis ino, Cupido argiades, Iphiclides podalirius, Lampides boeticus, Nymphalis xanthomelas, Polyommatus coridon and Pontia daplidice), are also included. Nomenclature is according to Fauna Europaea (http://www.faunaeur.org/full_results.php?id=7).

Temporal Coverage

Sampling Methods

Butterfly observations (species, date, location, observer) were recorded by volunteers/citizen scientists at http://www.waarnemingen.be. Since 2011, 69% of the records had a precision of 25m or less. Because of the increasing popularity of mobile apps using GPS readings in the field, this proportion increased with 5% per year to reach 77% in 2015.

Method step description:

1. Not provided.

Bibliographic Citations

1. Maes D, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Vantieghem P, Brosens D, Gielen K, Beck O, Van Dyck H, Desmet P, Vlinderwerkgroep Natuurpunt (2016) A database on the distribution of butterflies (Lepidoptera) in northern Belgium (Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region). ZooKeys 585: 143-156. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.585.8019 http://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.585.8019
2. Daniëls L (1991). JNM-Dagvlinderprojekt. Euglena, 10: 26-27.
3. De Prins W (1998). Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Belgium, Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen, Brussel, 235 pp.
4. De Selys-Longchamps E (1837). Catalogue des Lepidoptères ou Papillons de la Belgique. Luik. 14-21.
5. Hackray J, Sarlet L, Berger L (1969). Catalogue des macrolépidoptères de Belgique. Lambillionea (suppl.), 67: 1-256.
6. Kühn E, Feldmann R, Harpke A, Hirneisen N, Musche M, Leopold P, Settele J (2008). Getting the public involved in butterfly conservation: Lessons learned from a new monitoring scheme in Germany. Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution, 54: 89-103. doi: 10.1560/IJEE.54.1.89 http://doi.org/10.1560/IJEE.54.1.89
7. Maes D, Van Dyck H (1996). Een gedocumenteerde Rode lijst van de dagvlinders van Vlaanderen, Mededelingen van het Instituut voor Natuurbehoud Instituut voor Natuurbehoud, Brussel, 154 pp.
8. Maes D, Van Dyck H (1999). Dagvlinders in Vlaanderen - Ecologie, verspreiding en behoud, Stichting Leefmilieu i.s.m. Instituut voor Natuurbehoud en Vlaamse Vlinderwerkgroep, Antwerpen/Brussel, 480 pp.
9. Maes D, Vanreusel W, Jacobs I, Berwaerts K, Van Dyck H (2012). Applying IUCN Red List criteria at a small regional level: A test case with butterflies in Flanders (north Belgium). Biological Conservation, 145: 258-266. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2011.11.021 http://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2011.11.021
10. Maes D, Vanreusel W, Van Dyck H (2013). Dagvlinders in Vlaanderen: nieuwe kennis voor betere actie, Uitgeverij Lannoo nv, Tielt, 542 pp.
11. Maes D, Brosens D, Beck O, Van Dyck H, Desmet P, Vlinderwerkgroep Natuurpunt, all butterfly recorders (2016): Vlinderdatabank - Butterflies in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). Dataset/Occurrence. http://doi.org/10.15468/njgbmh Data paper: http://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.585.8019 http://doi.org/10.15468/njgbmh
12. 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. doi: 10.1080/13658810412331280211 http://doi.org/10.1080/13658810412331280211

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