The LifeWatch Community Platform is here!

LifeWatch followers and collaborators are cordially invited to the grand unveiling of the LifeWatch Community platform, now openly available to everyone! Who should become a member? Well, if you’re interested in biodiversity and ecosystem research, then you should!

Cut trough shell and Common cockle stand firm in the Big Annual Seashell Survey

Two thousand volunteers counted 82,444 shells, from a total of 66 species during the sixth edition of the Big Annual Seashell Survey last Saturday. Cut trough shell and Common cockle made it into the top five in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. But there were also interesting regional differences. Less than 1% of the checked shells had a 'drill hole' due to predation by snails.

WoRMS Philanthropy grants 2022

During 2022, the VLIZ Philanthropy program was able to issue three grants to support WoRMS editors in making WoRMS more complete. This resulted in about 18.000 edits and additions to WoRMS and its sub-registers.

WoRMS press release: Ten remarkable new marine species from 2022

As for previous years, the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) has again released its annual list of the top-ten marine species described by researchers during the past year to coincide with World Taxonomist Appreciation Day on March 19th!

Call for Abstracts: The LifeWatch ERIC BEeS Biodiversity & Ecosystem eScience Conference

Roll up, roll up! Abstracts are now open for the LifeWatch ERIC "BEeS” Biodiversity & Ecosystem eScience Conference “Threats and challenges to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation from an eScience perspective”, which is scheduled to coincide with Biodiversity Day 2023.

3.5 million project aims to solve mysteries about fish migration through main European swimways

A new EU-funded project, STRAITS, will equip all four corners of Europe to track aquatic life in an effort to better understand their biology and ecology, and aid in conservation and management.

LifeWatch collaborates with all-women expedition studying orcas and whales above the Arctic circle

This winter, LifeWatch provided a key contribution to a citizen science initiative studying marine ecosystem change, orca and whale behaviour in northern Norway, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, during the winter herring run.

Our bird tracking data are now archived on GBIF and OBIS!

New open source workflow enables the publication of tracking data from Movebank to GBIF and OBIS.

Explore the traits in WoRMS and Aphia with a brand-new R Shiny application

With this new R Shiny application, you can explore all trait information in the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and its underlying Aphia database in a more advanced way, for instance by combining different traits and combining traits with standardized distributions.

LifeWatch citizen scientists got in-depth training on plastic

SeaWatchers closed the year-end of 2022 in an educational way. They took part in the 'plastic' training which zoomed in on the importance of collecting 'marine litter' data, the optimisation of the current protocol and through which methodology they can also provide data at European level.