Francisco Hernandez

Vlaams Instituut Voor De Zee | VLIZ · Data center

Aquatic biotelemetry techniques have proven to be valuable tools to generate knowledge on species behaviour, gather oceanographic data and help in assessing effects from anthropogenic disturbances. These data types support international policies and directives, needed for species and habitat conservation. As aquatic systems are highly interconnecte...

Marine data are needed for many purposes: for acquiring a better scientific understanding of the marine environment, but also, increasingly, as marine knowledge for decision making as well as developing products and services supporting economic growth. Data must be of sufficient quality to meet the specific users' needs. It must also be accessible...

The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) is responsible for the set-up of the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone (LW-TaxBB), as a central part of the European LifeWatch Infrastructure. The LW-TaxBB aims to (virtually) bring together different component databases and data systems, all of them related to taxonomy, biogeography, ecology, genetics and literature...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by scientists to perform research and support innovation. A number of EU research infrastructures [e.g. e-Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch) European Research Iinfrastructures Consortium (ERIC); The European lif...

Through regular sampling surveys, the Flanders Marine Institute is generating long term data series for the Belgian coastal water and sand bank systems, a designated site in the Long term Ecological Research (LTER) network. The data series is built on sampling activities initiated in 2002, but gradually upgraded and extended in the framework of the...

Through regular sampling surveys, the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) is generating a long‐term data series for the Belgian coastal water and sandbank system, a designated site in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. The data series is built from sampling activities initiated in 2012 in the framework of the LifeWatch marine observator...

Background Globally, there are a large and growing number of researchers using biotelemetry as a tool to study aquatic animals. In Europe, this community lacks a formal network structure. The aim of this study is to review the use of acoustic telemetry in Europe and document the contribution of cross-boundary studies and inter-research group collab...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

Phytoplankton form the basis of the marine food web and are an indicator for the overall status of the marine ecosystem. Changes in this community may impact a wide range of species (Capuzzo et al. 2018) ranging from zooplankton and fish to seabirds and marine mammals. Efficient monitoring of the phytoplankton community is therefore essential (Edwa...

The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2017. WoRMS is a unique database: there is no comparable global database for marine species, which is driven by a large, global expert community, is supported by a Data Management Team and can rely on a permanent host institute, dedicated to keeping WoRMS online. Over t...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

The World Register of Marine Species aims to provide the most authoritative list of names of all marine species, ever published through a freely available online portal. In 2017, WoRMS celebrated its 10 th anniversary. This was an excellent opportunity to both look backward and forward, by analyzing how the system has grown, how it is used and how...

The World Register of Marine Species aims to provide the most authoritative list of names of all marine species, ever published through a freely available online portal. In 2017, WoRMS celebrated its 10 th anniversary. This was an excellent opportunity to both look backward and forward, by analyzing how the system has grown, how it is used and how...

Acoustic telemetry is a commonly applied method to investigate the ecology of marine animals and provides a scientific basis for management and conservation. Crucial insight in animal behaviour and ecosystem functioning and dynamics is gained through acoustic receiver networks that are established in many different environments around the globe. Th...

The World Register of Marine species (WoRMS) has been established for a decade. The early history of the database involved compilation of existing global and regional species registers. This aggregation, combined with changes to data types and the changing needs of WoRMS users, has resulted in an evolution of data-entry consistency over time. With...

Ideally, datasets for species distribution modelling (SDM) contain evenly sampled records covering the entire distribution of the species, confirmed absences and auxiliary ecophysiological data allowing informed decisions on relevant predictors. Unfortunately, these criteria are rarely met for marine organisms for which distributions are too often...

This is a Short Note without an abstract.

The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) aims to integrate smaller, isolateddatasets into a larger, more comprehensive picture of life in our oceans. Therefore, OBIS provides a gateway to many datasets containing information on where and when marinespecies have been observed. The datasets within OBIS are contributed by a network ofhundreds...

The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is the world’s most comprehensive online, open-access database of marine species distributions. OBIS grows with millions of new species observations every year. Contributions come from a network of hundreds of institutions, projects and individuals with common goals: to build a scientific knowledge...

In this data paper, Bird tracking - GPS tracking of Lesser Black-backed Gulls and Herring Gulls breeding at the southern North Sea coast is described, a species occurrence dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). The dataset (version 5.5) contains close to 2.5 million occurrences, recorded by 101 GPS trackers mounte...

The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. The latter allows easy access to experts so they can update the content of the database in a timely fashion. Aphia is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and it...

Background: Reliable taxonomy underpins communication in all of biology, not least nature conservation and sustainable use of ecosystem resources. The flexibility of taxonomic interpretations, however, presents a serious challenge for end-users of taxonomic concepts. Users need standardised and continuously harmonised taxonomic reference systems,...

Being able to assess the quality and level of completeness of data has become indispensable in marine biodiversity research, especially when dealing with large databases that typically compile data from a variety of sources. Very few integrated databases offer quality flags on the level of the individual record, making it hard for users to easily e...

GIS has become an indispensable tool for managing and displaying marine spatial data. However, a unique georeferenced standard of marine place names and boundaries has yet to be established. As such, an online, open-access, standardized, hierarchical list of geographic names, that is, Marine Regions, has been developed, linking each of these names...

The Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life is planned to become a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth. Rapid progress has been made recently and this Catalogue of Life edition contains 1,352,112 species. The present Catalogue is compiled with sectors provided by 132 taxonomic databases from around the world. Many of th...

Background: The question of how many marine species exist is important because it provides a metric for how much we do and do not know about life in the oceans. We have compiled the first register of the marine species of the world and used this baseline to estimate how many more species, partitioned among all major eukaryotic groups, may be disco...

The European Ocean Biogeographic Information System—EurOBIS—is an integrated data system developed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) for the EU Network of Excellence “Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning” (MarBEF) in 2004. Its principle aims are to centralise the largely scattered biogeographical data on marine species collected by E...

An integrated database on meiofauna was developed with the funding of the European Union Network of Excel-lence on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (MarBEF). The general aim of the project was to integrate the available information on the structure, dynamics and functional role of marine meiofauna, and in particular nematodes and harpa...

The topics and issues raised in the electronic conference have been presented to the Marbena Workshop in Piran (Slovenia) held on 27 November-1 December 2004. This volume includes introductions and summaries of discussions. All the discussion points raised during the conference can be reviewed by registering onto http://www.vliz.be/marbena This pub...

1 Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), InnovOcean site, Wandelaarkaai 7, B-8400 Oostende, Belgium 2 Afdeling Maritieme Toegang, Tavernierkaai 3, B-2000 Antwerpen, Belgium Policy and management of the Scheldt Estuary are a transnational issue which concerns both Flanders and the Netherlands. Since the end of the last century, Flanders and the Netherlan...