Results of the large data integration MacroBen (large-scale studies of the European benthos) published in Open Access in a theme section of Marine Ecology Progress Series.

The five-year MarBEF (Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning) project came to an end on 30 April 2009. MarBEF was a Network of Excellence launched under the 6th framework programme of the European Commission. The network currently comprises 94 institutions and unites almost one thousand marine scientists in Europe. The VLIZ was responsible for the website (www.marbef.org) and the data integration.

Thanks to the cooperation and trust within this community over 100 scientists their data available. Formerly fragmented and scattered among the different institutions, these data sets are now completely documented, archived and integrated. With 251 data sets integrated into one data system and 5.4 million distribution data of 17,000 species from all European seas, the MarBEF consortium now features the world‘s largest database of macrobenthos and meiobenthos and of pelagic marine species. Due to the size of this integrated database (both with regard to time and space) the researchers gained better insights in the patterns and processes influencing marine biodiversity.

An example of this data integration is the MacroBen database: all available biodiversity and distribution data of the larger infauna of soft sediments from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea. The results of this data integration are now published in a theme section of the scientific journal ‘Marine Ecology Progress Series’ (in Open Acces, thus freely available). The role of the VLIZ data centre was to develop the database, to perform quality checks and to offer statistical analysis instruments.