The occurrences are derived from the database http://www.waarnemingen.be, hosted at the nature conservation NGO Natuurpunt in collaboration with Stichting Natuurinformatie. Standardized information regarding sex, lifeStage, behavior, occurrenceRemarks, and samplingProtocol are included as well.
Generalized and/or withheld information: location information is generalized to 5 x 5 km² Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid cells. Observer name, exact XY-coordinates, toponyms, and photographs are not included in the published dataset, but are known in the source database.
The publication of this dataset is supported by INBO and funded by Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) as part of the Belgian contribution to LifeWatch.
The observations (species, date, location, observer) were recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists) at http://www.waarnemingen.be. The dataset also includes historical records and datasets imported in waarnemingen.be. The majority of the data are presence-only data (absence data are not included in this dataset).
Recorded data are constantly verified by species group specialists taking collection specimens, the observer’s species knowledge, added photographs and known species list of locations into account. The validation procedure from www.waarnemingen.be consists of an interactive procedure in which observers can be asked for additional information by a team of validators, after which the validator manually adds a validation status. Records that are not manually validated are additionally checked by an automated validation procedure that takes into account the number of manually validated observations within a specified date and distance range. 5% of the observations in this dataset are supported by photographs on www.waarnemingen.be. The validation status is indicated in the field identificationVerificationStatus, the link to the original record in references.