LifeWatch Flanders ready for the next level!

The Flemish LifeWatch Consortium receives additional funding for the next years.

Life in the North Sea is becoming more exotic

79 alien marine & brackish water animals and algae from the Belgian part of the North Sea and the Scheldt Estuary not only documented in a book, but also accessible through the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone.

LifeWatch to the (data) rescue: More than 90 historical datasets available!

Collected once, ready to be used many times!

Call for nominations for the WoRMS Top-Ten Marine Species of 2020

Although it has been a difficult year for everyone, we know that taxonomists have continued to publish many wonderful new species throughout. So as we approach the end of the year it is time to think about nominations for The WoRMS Top Ten Marine Species of 2020!

The migratory fish need our help!

Who still remembers that wild Atlantic salmon was once a local product, caught in the Scheldt, IJzer or Maas rivers?

Use your gaming skills to save the eel!

Pieterjan Verhelst, a biotelemetry scientist and frequent user of the Belgian LifeWatch infrastructure developed a game “Save the eel”, to inform the general public about the obstacles eels face during their seaward migration.

Coming soon: LifeWatch data cloud application with Belgian marine data for blue economy

The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), the Blue Cluster (DBC) and the Flemish Supercomputing Center (VSC) inquired after the needs for data applications of the Flemish maritime companies, and how supercomputing can be a solution for this. Very recently, LifeWatch Belgium designed a pilot data cloud on the high-performance infrastructure of the VSC for making Belgian marine (biodiversity) data available to maritime companies, in a quick and efficient manner.

The World Flora Online & the International Compositae Alliance join forces

About six months after the official launch of the Global Compositae Database through the Aphia infrastructure, its content is now being shared with the World Flora Online. The collaboration between these two initiatives has become official through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

Streamlining of the environment flags on all higher taxonomic levels

Although the environment flag in Aphia was quite complete on species level already, there were still some gaps on the higher taxonomic levels. This has now been improved, representing a major update for the Aphia related services and downloads.

LifeWatch Belgium: a highly innovative infrastructure for biodiversity research

The third edition of the LifeWatch.be Users & Stakeholders Meeting took place on October 15th and 16th 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year’s edition happened entirely online.