IMIS - Marine Research Groups

Generalized and/or withheld information: location information is generalized to 4 x 4 km² IFBL 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 Instituut voor Floristiek van België en Luxemburg (IFBL) grid cells of 4 x 4 km², 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 2,828 meters (Wieczorek et al. 2004).
Taxonomic coverage: The datasets contains close to 1,200 naturally occurring vascular plant species (as well as a number of subspecies, varieties, forms, hybrids and multispecies) recorded in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. This includes angiosperms (flowering plants), gymnosperms, ferns and allies, but not algae, mosses and lichens. If the observer remarked that the specific individual was introduced by man, then this is recorded in the field establishmentMeans.
Sampling methods: The observations (species, date, location, observer) were recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists) at http://www.waarnemingen.be. The dataset also includes historical records and datasets imported in waarnemingen.be.
Quality control: Recorded data are constantly verified by a group of botanical experts (including professional botanists) taking collection specimens, the observer’s species knowledge, added photographs and known species list of locations into account. The validation procedure from www.waarnemingen.be consists of an interactive procedure in which observers can be asked for additional information by a team of validators, after which the validator manually adds a validation status. Records that are not manually validated are additionally checked by an automated validation procedure that takes into account the number of manually validated observations within a specified date and distance range. 13% of the plant records in this dataset are supported by photographs on www.waarnemingen.be. The validation status is indicated in the field identificationVerificationStatus, the link to the original record in references.
The publication of this dataset was supported by the INBO as part of the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch.