IMIS

There are 36 native terrestrial isopod species in Belgium (De Smedt et al. 2018) and only one (i.e. Miktoniscus patiencei Vandel, 1946) hasn’t been detected in Belgium between 2011 and 2020. The occurrences originate from field surveys, pitfall trap projects and casual observations. The recorded data are registered through the citizen science portals waarnemingen.be and observations.be, managed by Natuurpunt Studie and Natagora respectively. All data were verified by experts. Here, the dataset is published as a standardized Darwin Core Archive and includes for each record an occurrenceID, reference, date, location and scientific name and if available also individual count, sex, lifestage, behavior, sampling protocol and information on the identification.
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.
To allow anyone to use this dataset, we have released the data to the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). We would appreciate however, if you read and follow these norms for data use (http://www.natuurpunt.be/normen-voor-datagebruik) and provide a link to the original dataset (https://doi.org/10.15468/mw9c66) whenever possible. If you use these data for a scientific paper, please cite the dataset following the applicable citation norms and/or consider us for co-authorship. We are always interested to provide more information and available for help with analysing the data for your project, so please contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata or via pepijn@spinicornis.be.
Belgium is a small country (ca. 30.500 km²) in Western Europe. It has a short shoreline (approx. 65 km) along the North Sea. The country is part of two European biogeographical regions, namely the Atlantic and the Continental region. The Atlantic region is largely covered by agricultural land and urban areas. The Continental region is less covered by agricultural land and urban areas and is instead more forested. Despite its small size, Belgium has a rich geology going from a flat Atlantic region in the west consisting of Holocene and Pleistocene deposits to a Continental hilly landscape with Mesozoic and Pleistocene deposits in the east and the south. The Atlantic region has clay loam and heavy clay soils in the northwest, and loam and sandy loam soils in the middle with a relatively high terrestrial isopod diversity. On the sandy soils in the northeast of the Atlantic region, terrestrial isopod diversity is rather low. The Continental region contains two bands of soils with calcareous outcrops, with a high species richness of terrestrial isopods. In between these chalky soil bands and in the east of the country, the land is covered by slate and sandstone soils, some with large areas of peatlands, which are more species poor.
The dataset covers data from 35 native species of terrestrial isopods (Order Isopoda, Suborder Oniscidea) found in Belgium between 2011 and 2020. Also included are records for 3 multispecies for which identification was not possible based on photographs or for samples lacking males.
In every Belgian UTM 10km square, three different habitats (if present) were checked for terrestrial isopods: a deciduous forest, a river or stream side and an anthropogenic habitat (garden, park, graveyard, etc.). Disused stone quarries or coastal habitats were also visited if present. The vast majority of the observations originate from field observations where terrestrial isopods were collected by hand or photographed. A minority comes from pitfall traps or other trap types (e.g. sugar bait traps). The project of Spinicornis was finished at the beginning of 2020 and resulted in an ecological atlas of the terrestrial isopods of Belgium (De Smedt et al. 2020). The majority of the data are presence-only data (absence data are not included in this dataset).