Empowering Biodiversity Research Symposium

On May 21st 2015, some 140 participants (biodiversity researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders) gathered in the Palace of the Academies, in the center of Brussels for the Empowering Biodiversity Research Conference. This conference was organized by the Belgian Biodiversity Platform and several key institutes (a.o. the Flanders Marine Institute) and universities in the field pf Biodiversity Informatics, with the aim to inform on ongoing Biodiversity informatics initiatives in Belgium and reinforce further collaboration amongst actors. As part of the Biodiversity Fair, an extensive LifeWatch Belgium demonstration booth was build, where each Belgian LifeWatch partner demonstrated their activities through posters, loop-presentations and vide fragments. During the afternoon session, some aspects of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure were presented in plenary showcases: (1) Showcase 1: Fly, my pretties, fly! Exploring, visualizing and publishing bird tracking data; (2) Showcase 2: Putting rare animal occurrences into context with remote sensing time series from LifeWatch; (3) Showcase 3: Services and databases for species taxonomy, distribution and traits in the framework of a Species Information Backbone for LifeWatch; and (4) Showcase 4: Exploring Antarctic biodiversity data.