Waarnemingen.be - Plant 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 2,300,868 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:

Steeman R, Vanreusel W, Barendse R, Verloove F, Wysmantel N, Van den Bussche W, Gyselinck T, Hendrickx P, Zwaenepoel A, Van Vooren P, Desmet P, Gielen K, Herremans M, Swinnen K, all plant working groups and plant observers (2021): Waarnemingen.be - Plant occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. v1.8. Natuurpunt. Dataset/Occurrence. https://doi.org/10.15468/fyuklz

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: bfc6fe18-77c7-4ede-a555-9207d60d1d86.  Natuurpunt publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Belgian Biodiversity Platform.

Keywords

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

Contacts

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 Instituut voor Floristiek van België en Luxemburg (IFBL) grid cells of 4 x 4 km², 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 2,828 meters using Wieczorek et al. (2004).

Taxonomic Coverage

The dataset contains almost 1,300 naturally occurring vascular plant species (as well as a number of subspecies, varieties, forms, cultivars, hybrids and multispecies) recorded in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. This includes species that are native, vagrant or migrant. The scope includes angiosperms (flowering plants), gymnosperms, ferns and allies, but not algae, mosses and lichens. The taxonomic reference for the dataset is Heukels’ Flora of the Netherlands by Van der Meijden (2005) which follows the classification as suggested by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG II 2003).

Temporal Coverage

Sampling Methods

Most observations (species, date, location, observer) were recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists). 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).

Method step description:

1. Not provided.

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

Additional Metadata