Waarnemingen.be - Fish occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium. v1.7.

• Main Authors: Vanreusel, Wouter, Gielen, Karin, Van den Neucker, Tom, Jooris, Robert, Desmet, Peter
• Other Authors: Herremans, Marc
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Biology; Cetorhinus maximus
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1925710151162165141

Abstract: Waarnemingen.be - Fish occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by Natuurpunt. The dataset contains close to 13,000 fish occurrences of 125 naturally occurring species (native, vagrant or migrant species), recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists), mainly since 2008. The occurrences are derived from the database http://www.waarnemingen.be, hosted at the nature conservation NGO Natuurpunt in collaboration with Stichting Natuurinformatie. Generalized and/or withheld information: location information is generalized to 5 x 5 km² Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid cells. Observer name, exact XY-coordinates, toponyms, and photographs are not included in the published dataset, but are known in the source database. 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 grid cells of 5 x 5 km² of the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system, 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 3,536 meters using Wieczorek et al. 2004. Taxonomic coverage: The datasets contains 125 naturally occurring fish species (as well as a number of varieties, hybrids and multispecies) recorded in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. This includes species that are native, vagrant or migrant. If the observer remarked that the specific individual was introduced by man, then this is recorded in the field establishmentMeans. The class Actinopterygii is best represented in this dataset (108 species), in addition to 13 Chondrichthyes (Cetorhinus maximus, Dasyatis pastinaca, Leucoraja ...