Claus, S.

Dekeyzer, S.

Deneudt, K.

Goffin, A.

Hernandez, F.

Vandepitte, L.

Open Marine Archive

 - 38 -  
The Flemish contributions to LifeWatch 
Dekeyzer Stefanie, Klaas Deneudt, Leen Vandepitte, Annelies Goffin, Simon Claus and  
Francisco Hernandez 
Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), InnovOcean site, Wandelaarkaai 7, 8400 Oostende, Belgium 
E-mail: stefanie.dekeyzer@vliz.be  
The biodiversity on Earth is declining at an alarming rate: worldwide ecosystems are disappearing 
and many species are threatened with extinction. And, unfortunately, our role in this worrying story 
can no longer be ignored, since the cause for this loss in biodiversity is largely associated with 
human population growth. Furthermore, the current availability of and access to habitat 
observations and ecosystem biodiversity data at species level is poor, indicating large spatial and 
temporal gaps. 
 
This discrepancy identified the need for infrastructure facilities that support biodiversity 
observations, research and management. Therefore it is increasingly important that Europe 
develops novel approaches to understand and manage our living environment, allowing for the 
development of reliable and science-based management strategies. 
 
Within this framework, LifeWatch was established as part of the European Strategy Forum on 
Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). LifeWatch is a distributed virtual laboratory and will be used for 
biodiversity research, for climatological and environmental impact studies, to support the 
development of ecosystem services and to provide information for policy makers in Europe. This 
large European research infrastructure will consist of several biodiversity observatories, databases, 
web services and modelling tools. It will be integrating the existing systems, upgrading them were 
possible and developing new systems where needed. 
 
The Flemish contributions to the LifeWatch infrastructure are coordinated by the Flanders Marine 
Institute (VLIZ) and the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO).  
 
Flanders is contributing to the central LifeWatch components with a taxonomic backbone, which will 
include taxonomy access services, a taxonomic editing environment, species occurrence services 
and catalogue services. These species information services will facilitate the standardization of 
species data and the integration of the distributed biodiversity data repositories and operating 
facilities. 
 
Furthermore, Flanders is contributing to the regional LifeWatch components with marine, freshwater 
and terrestrial observatories, several biodiversity data systems, web services, models and 
applications. These online data services, models and applications will make up the interactive part 
of the LifeWatch.be portal and will form a valuable contribution to the data available from the 
supporting data systems, the taxonomic backbone, and the data collected by the observatories and 
sensor networks. 
 
In order to fill the spatial and temporal gaps in the biodiversity data that is currently available to 
science, data archaeology activities will be carried out during the LifeWatch construction phase. This 
will improve the accessibility and visibility of the data for the scientific community. 


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