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

Occurrence
Latest version published by Natuurpunt on Apr 30, 2021 Natuurpunt
Publication date:
30 April 2021
Published by:
Natuurpunt
License:
CC0 1.0

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 27,273 records in English (995 KB) - Update frequency: not planned
Metadata as an EML file download in English (16 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file download in English (14 KB)

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.

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 27,273 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

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Lock K, Gielen K, Vanreusel W, Herremans M, Desmet P, Swinnen K, all insect observers (2021): Waarnemingen.be - Other insect occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. v1.4. Natuurpunt. Dataset/Occurrence. https://doi.org/10.15468/vcaflk

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: 27e9e069-2862-4183-bcec-1e1a7f74d3e7.  Natuurpunt publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Belgian Biodiversity Platform.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation; insects; distribution; observations; citizen science; Natuurpunt; waarnemingen.be; observation.org; Occurrence

Contacts

Koen Lock
  • Originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
Karin Gielen
  • Originator
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
Wouter Vanreusel
Marc Herremans
  • Originator
  • Point Of Contact
Natuurpunt Studie
BE
Peter Desmet
  • Metadata Provider
  • Originator
Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO)
BE
Kristijn Swinnen
all insect observers

Geographic Coverage

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).

Bounding Coordinates South West [50.67, 2.53], North East [51.51, 5.94]

Taxonomic Coverage

The dataset 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).

Kingdom Animalia (animals)
Phylum Arthropoda
Class Insecta (insects)

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 1974-04-06 / 2018-12-31

Sampling Methods

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).

Study Extent See geographic coverage.
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 step description:

  1. Not provided.

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

Additional Metadata

Alternative Identifiers 27e9e069-2862-4183-bcec-1e1a7f74d3e7
https://ipt.inbo.be/resource?r=insecten-natuurpunt-occurrences