Dataset of ocean vessel traffic in the North Sea.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a technology that allows ships to broadcast their position, course, speed, and other information to other vessels or shore-based stations. By collecting and analysing this data, it is possible to create a heatmap of ship activity in a particular region, such as the North Sea. This heatmap acts as a representation of vessel activity per class.

Marked changes in diatom and dinoflagellate biomass, composition and seasonality in the Belgian Part of the North Sea between the 1970s and 2000s.

In the last decades, the North Sea has undergone intense environmental changes which have led to regime shifts that affected all trophic levels. Since the 1970s, both increases and decreases in phytoplankton biomass and production have been reported from different parts of the North Sea. Such conflicting observations may be partly caused by methodological differences, but also reflect regional differences related to bathymetry, hydrodynamics, climate, riverine and Atlantic influence.

Biodiversity data rescue in the framework of a long-term Kenya-Belgium cooperation in marine sciences.

The Kenya-Belgium data collection includes about 111,800 biotic observations on benthos, algae, fish, zooplankton, phytoplankton, birds and mangroves which cover more than 400 unique locations that were sampled between 1873 and 1999. The scope of this data digitization project was to recover data in theses and reports resulting from marine and coastal research activities in the Eastern African region conducted between 1984 and 1999. Data were digitized and quality checked in the frame of the Belgian LifeWatch project.

Marine phytoplankton community composition data from the Belgian part of the North Sea, 1968-2010.

The Belgian Phytoplankton Database (BPD) is a comprehensive data collection comprising quantitative phytoplankton cell counts from multiple research projects conducted since 1968. The collection is focused on the Belgian part of the North Sea, but also includes data from the French and the Dutch part of the North Sea. The database includes almost 300 unique sampling locations and more than 3,000 sampling events resulting in more than 86,000 phytoplankton cell count records.

Fishing for data and sorting the catch: assessing the data quality, completeness and fitness for use of data in marine biogeographic databases.

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 extract the data that are fit for their specific purposes. This article describes the different steps that were developed to analyse the quality and completeness of the distribution records within the European and international Ocean Biogeographic Information Systems (EurOBIS and OBIS).

Improving transferability of introduced species' distribution models: new tools to forecast the spread of a highly invasive seaweed.

The utility of species distribution models for applications in invasion and global change biology is critically dependent on their transferability between regions or points in time, respectively. We introduce two methods that aim to improve the transferability of presence-only models: density-based occurrence thinning and performance-based predictor selection. We evaluate the effect of these methods along with the impact of the choice of model complexity and geographic background on the transferability of a species distribution model between geographic regions.

Climate change impact on seaweed meadow distribution in the North Atlantic rocky intertidal.

The North-Atlantic has warmed faster than all other ocean basins and climate change scenarios predict sea surface temperature isotherms to shift up to 600 km northwards by the end of the 21st century. The pole-ward shift has already begun for many temperate seaweed species that are important intertidal foundation species. We asked the question: Where will climate change have the greatest impact on three foundational, macroalgal species that occur along North-Atlantic shores: Fucus serratus, Fucus vesiculosus, and Ascophyllum nodosum? To predict distributional changes of these key species under three IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate change scenarios (A2, A1B, and B1) over the coming two centuries, we generated Ecological Niche Models with the program MAXENT.

Contrasting geographical distributions as a result of thermal tolerance and long-distance dispersal in two allegedly widespread tropical brown algae.

Background: Many tropical marine macroalgae are reported from all three ocean basins, though these very wide distributions may simply be an artifact resulting from inadequate taxonomy that fails to take into account cryptic diversity. Alternatively, pantropical distributions challenge the belief of limited intrinsic dispersal capacity of marine seaweeds and the effectiveness of the north-south oriented continents as dispersal barriers. We aimed to re-assess the distribution of two allegedly circumtropical brown algae, Dictyota ciliolata and D.