LifeWatch Belgium, a very active research community!

The Cytosense Flow Cytometer used by the team of Reinhoud de Blok aboard RV Simon Stevin - Photo: LifeWatch.be - VLIZ, Jonas Mortelmans (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

During this full-day event, users of the Belgian LifeWatch.be infrastructure were given the chance to present their ongoing research and first results. The status of several individual research projects were presented, as for example on implementation of:
• the gull tracking sytem by Luk Lens (TEREC - UGent)
• the fish acoustic receivers network by Pieterjan Verhelst (MARBIOL - UGent)
• the Zooscan and Video Plankton Recorder by Yana Deschutter (MARBIOL - UGent)
• the Cytosense Flow Cytometer by Reinhoud de Blok (PAE – UGent)
• the eDNA analysis infrastructure by Tara Grosemans (ECOTOX – UGent)
• a newly created R-package SDMPREDICTORS by Samuel Bosch (VLIZ)
• the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone by Leen Vandepitte (VLIZ)

Since the previous edition of the User Meeting in June 2014, many additional research projects started and a lot of progress has been made: while the previous meeting was limited to describing the infrastructure itself and explaining some future plans, the present meeting showed the progress made, (first) results and ongoing analyses of the research.

The last three presentations of the day were spent to a discussion on the more general use of the Lifewatch.be Infrastructure: How the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone can be of use to all of the users? Which workshops are being organized as a service to the users? Which are the most recent LifeWatch e-infrastructure developments?

Read all the abstracts and more it in the report on the LifeWatch.be website.

(*) In 2012, Belgium started constructing its LifeWatch infrastructure. The initial Belgian LifeWatch partners involved were the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) and the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), funded through the Hercules Foundation (is nu FWO Vlaanderen). In 2013, the Earth and Life Institute of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) started their participation, based on support from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. In 2014, UCL joined forces with the Biosystems Engineering Department of the Université de Liège/Gembloux-ABT. This LifeWatch Wallonia-Brussel team is further financed through the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Later that same year, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) joined the LifeWatch Belgium Team, coordinating the federal contributions. RBINS is collaborating closely with the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). Another federal partner who joined in 2014 is the Belgian Biodiversity Platform.