Zooplankton and phytoplankton are essential to coastal ecosystems, playing crucial roles in marine food webs. Environmental changes like climate change and pollution threaten these delicate communities, making monitoring crucial. The Video Plankton Recorder (VPR), integrated with LifeWatch...
The first report "What is the state of the North Sea?" by the LifeWatch citizen science project SeaWatch-B shows that the Belgian North Sea is affected by human activities, more in particular climate change. Cold-water species such as the North Sea shrimp are decreasing in number compared to a...
Though plankton communities are omnipresent in our oceans, their wavering dynamics remain obscure. The international collaboration of the LifeWatch and JERICO-NEXT projects enabled to study plankton in the southern North Sea with state-of-the-art infrastructure at an optimal coverage.
"Covering almost three-quarters of the Earth's surface, the world’s great oceans are home to an incredibly diverse web of life. The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) currently lists just under a quarter of a million species, with new ones being identified all the time. But even as we begin to...
Ever wondered how the Ocean Health Index gets data for its global assessment of the entire ocean? There's more to it than you'd guess! And Marine Regions is part of the answer!
Before the Big Seashell Survey started, there was little quantitative information on the species and numbers of shells that wash ashore at the Belgian coast. However, beached shells can say a great deal about climate change, environmental pollution, impact of human activities at sea and changes in...
The second World Ocean Assessment – WOA II – is a global exercise by hundreds of marine scientists to evaluate trends and identify knowledge gaps in the world ocean. Two chapters of WOA II have made use of several components of the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone.
Increasing human activities are putting the ocean under stress, threatening the ecological health of marine ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Since plankton are sensitive to changes in environmental conditions and are short-lived, they can be used as early warning systems for the...
Environmental responsibility is a hot topic these days! For the Brazilian oil and gas magnate Petrobras, this means caring for the safety of their operations and undertaking actions to balance their activities and the welfare of their workforce and of the communities. By improving products and...
MarineTraffic displays the movement of over 550.000 vessels worldwide, based on their Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals. The website attracts millions of users on a monthly basis. Since March 31st, these vessel locations can also be plotted against the global Exclusive Economic Zones...