IMIS

The checklist is created through an open and reproducible workflow developed for the TrIAS project (http://trias-project.be, see Methodology). It is published here as a standardized Darwin Core Archive and includes for each taxon: the scientific name, higher classification and stable taxon identifier, provided by the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (in the taxon core) and related information in three extensions, provided by the source checklists (or the most trustworthy one in case of competing information). The related information consists of the year of first introduction and last assessment/observation in Belgium and where available its regions (given as a year range in the event date in the distribution extension), coarse habitat information (in the species profile extension) and the pathway(s) of introduction, native ranges (following UN geoscheme), and invasion stage in Belgium (in the description extension). The source for each piece of information is credited.
This checklist includes registered non-native taxa present in Belgium. It covers 3,036 unique taxa and five kingdoms: Plantae (2,264 taxa), Animalia (744 taxa), Fungi (25 taxa), Chromista (2 taxa) and Protozoa (1 taxon). This number of species is expected to increase with future updates. All taxonomic information is provided by the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei).
This unified checklist is the result of two open and reproducible data pipelines developed for the TrIAS project (http://trias-project.be). In the data publication pipeline, we use the Checklist recipe (https://github.com/trias-project/checklist-recipe/wiki) to standardize and publish a selection of authoritative species checklists as Darwin Core Archives to GBIF. Predominantly, these checklists record the presence of alien species in Belgium for a specific taxon group or habitat and are maintained by their respective authors. In the data processing pipeline, we extract all Belgian non-native taxa from these checklists and unify their taxonomy using the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei). This automated process is implemented and documented at https://trias-project.github.io/unified-checklist/ and described in brief in "Method step description". The sources used for the unified checklist are: 1. Manual of the Alien Plants of Belgium (Verloove et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/wtda1m), 2. Checklist of alien birds of Belgium (Preda et al. 2019, https://doi.org/10.15468/wr3gis), 3. Checklist of non-native freshwater fishes in Flanders, Belgium (Verreycken et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/xvuzfh), 4. Checklist of alien herpetofauna of Belgium (van Doorn et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.15468/pnxu4c), 5. Inventory of alien macroinvertebrates in Flanders, Belgium (Boets et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/yxcq07), 6. Registry of introduced terrestrial molluscs in Belgium (Backeljau et al. 2019, https://doi.org/10.15468/t13kwo), 7. Checklist of alien species in the Scheldt estuary in Flanders, Belgium (Soors et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.15468/8zq9s4), 8. Catalogue of the Rust Fungi of Belgium (Vanderweyen et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/2dboyn), 9. WRiMS: World Register of Introduced Marine Species (Flanders Marine Institute 2019, https://doi.org/10.14284/347), 10. Ad hoc checklist of alien species in Belgium (Reyserhove et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/3pmlxs), and 11. RINSE - Pathways and vectors of biological invasions in Northwest Europe (Zieritz et al. 2018, https://doi.org/10.15468/guejza)