Data requirements for biodiversity indicators

The rational use and conservation of biodiversity requires programmes of inventorying and monitoring that allow understanding the past and present states of biodiversity and the causes of its change. Inventories establish a baseline distribution of biodiversity for a particular place at a particular time. Monitoring addresses the issue of change or lack of change of biodiversity through time at particular places. Ideally some sort of modelling should allow for predicting future states of biodiversity. Biodiversity is a dynamic property of an ecosystem . The goal of a monitoring program is to document natural patterns of change or lack of change in order to establish a baseline for understanding the impact of natural disturbance on species composition and abundance in communities and ecosystems. Once this baseline is established it can be used to detect changes in biodiversity that result from human disturbance. An inventory will establish the magnitude of biodiversity over relatively short time spans whereas monitoring will serve to connect these observations over time, to assist in hypothesis testing and to help establish an early warning system that may be part of a global biodiversity assessment. The total assessment of biodiversity at a given site, let alone for a country or a region, through enumeration of the genetic diversity, the species and habitats is an impossible task to fulfil. A number of indicators or proxies is therefore required that provide information that is as unbiased as possible. Besides indicators for biodiversity other indicators are used to measure environmental health. The choice of an appropriate indicator is very important in terms of information and cost. To increase the usefulness of an indicator several frameworks have been developed. One of the most widely used is the Drivers-Pressure-State-Impact-Response DPSIR framework, but simpler and perhaps more convenient schemes are in use as well. At the European level, loss of biodiversity is one of the about ten policy fields to which these schemes are applied. All these indicators require massive collection of data and the good use of these collections is still a major problem in applied and fundamental ecological research both on governmental and academic level. Dealing with the massive information that has already been gathered and the still more massive information that will be collected in the future is one of the major challenges of the scientific community and the end-users of scientific information in general. The networking efforts of marine biodiversity in Europe provide a good example of the problems and the ways towards their solution

Why there are no famous Belgians

There are famous Belgians, except that nobody knows they are Belgians. I will give a few examples to start off. But there are very few famous scientists, let alone famous Belgian scientists. Everybody (I guess) knows Albert Einstein. All Belgians know Eddy Wally, but nobody else in the world knows Eddy Wally, I guess most marine biologists in the world will know Carlo Heip but hardly anyone in Belgium does. Science is a lonely business. As to my career, it can be mostly summarized in one word: luck. Being on the right moment at the right place. But you have to enforce your luck sometimes. Start off with writing at least one good paper that attracts attention. Be proud and confident of your work and go to meetings to present it and talk to people when you are young. When you are older: attract and educate good students (your students have to be smarter than you). Convince but also trust people, your peers, your scientific friends, science policy makers. Have a sense for where your science is or should be going. Above all be honest, you can cheat all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time, after Bob Dylan, one of the heroes from my generation

Larval development and biology of <i>Canuella perplexa</i> T. and A. Scott, 1893 (Copepoda, Harpacticoida)

Canuella perplexa is often a dominant species in meiobenthic communities of the northern hemisphere. The biology (propulsion, feeding behaviour, precopulatory behaviour, and hatching) and larval development of this species were examined on animals reared in the laboratory. Characters of the nauplius which were considered by Lang (1948) to be diagnostic of the Polyarthra will have to be reexamined in the light of the results on C. perplexa. The post-embryonic stages of the Canuellidae are morphologically different from the larval stages of the also primitive Longipediidae