Initiatives to be discovered in Room Telefonie (second floor)
World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)
Come and test your knowledge of marine biodiversity in an interactive quiz, and learn unimaginable facts about the ocean! The quiz takes place every fifteen minutes during the interactive sessions, with slightly different questions for each quiz. The winner of each quiz will receive a small prize.
Marine Protected Areas
Dive into a strategic game where you decide the fate of a new marine protected area using real-life data, all while navigating unforeseen challenges that test your conservation skills. This experience combines critical thinking with the thrill of unpredictability, inviting you to protect our ocean against all odds. Join us for a captivating journey of environmental stewardship, strategy, and collaboration, where your decisions make waves in the quest for marine conservation.
Detecting, tracking & mooring
How are migrations, habitat use and movement behavior of fish studied in their natural habitat? How can we detect schools and estimate fish biomass? In this booth, we showcase how acoustic sensors are used in the Marine Observation Center of VLIZ to observe and study marine animals. We offer the opportunity to understand how acoustic telemetry and biologgers work to study individual fish, and how sonar technology works to study pelagic schools. Learn how to tag a fish yourself, and see fascinating results that can be obtained from acoustic telemetry. Learn how echosounders work, solve crossword puzzles and discover how echograms of pelagic fish in the Belgian part of the North Sea look like!
VLIZ Library
Explore a sample of the rich marine book collection stored at VLIZ and marvel at the beautiful diversity housed within the library.
Plankton imaging & machine learning
Microscopic floating organisms are currently monitored using automated imaging devices. These devices produce millions of images that need to be identified. To this end, we make use of high performing machine leaning algorithms. This combination of automated devices and image recognition speeds up analysis significantly compared to traditional microscopic monitoring. Visitors can image plankton themself using the FlowCam device and they can try an label the images via the Zooniverse platform.
Citizen science: Grote Schelpenteldag (Big Seashell Survey)
The Big Seashell Survey, coordinated by VLIZ with support from LifeWatch, is one of the largest citizen science initiatives on Europe's coasts. During its seventh edition on Saturday 23 March 2024, thousands of participants in Flanders, the Netherlands and northern France will collect, count and identify shells, assisted by experts. The large-scale count of washed-up shells on more than 400km of North Sea coast provides scientists with a lot of knowledge on the occurrence of these marine animals, the impact of climate on biodiversity, and influx and evolution of exotic species.
Ecological modelling
Pelagic Fish Distribution Explorer: come and discover the seasonal variations in the distribution of pelagic fish through an interactive R shiny app. North Sea Foodweb Model: Get hands-on with the interconnectedness of North Sea biodiversity. Using an Ecopath app, you can navigate a Foodweb model and uncover the relationships between different marine organisms. Join the quiz and go home with a prize.
EMODnet
Visit the EMODnet exhibition booth to discover how marine data can empower research and support policy-making through our informative videos. We will guide you through our interactive map viewer and show you how to view, download and combine data from different thematics such as physics, chemistry, human activities, seabed habitats, geology and more.
EMODnet Biology
Learn more about EMODnet Biology, how it can help your research. We will run short quizzes to help you quickly gather information and give you a broad overview of our work.
EDITO
Discover EDITO, the EU's public infrastructure for the Digital Twin of the Ocean, at our exhibition booth. This innovative project integrates diverse data sources and advanced technologies to enable informed decisions for monitoring and enhancing marine habitats. Meet our EDITO experts and find out how you can use the platform for your own purposes.
DTO-BioFlow
Join the project DTO-BioFlow in its ambition to bring marine biodiversity data into the EU's Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) infrastructure. This project will unlock “sleeping” biodiversity data and create sustained flows to deliver these and new biodiversity monitoring data into the EU DTO, using an end-to-end approach to demonstrate its relevance with use cases relevant for policy makers.
UNESCO/IOC Project Office for IODE
IODE displays stands and demos about UNESCO IOC global contributions to ocean data, information, knowledge exchange and capacity development. These focus on connecting participants with the current initiatives as well as showcase opportunities for engagement and use of products and services provided by the three programme components (OBIS, ODIS, and OTGA, and projects), related to EU Mission Ocean sub-themes and UN Ocean Decade.
UN Ocean Decade & EU Mission Ocean
Be part of transformative actions: get to know more about the opportunities for ECOPs in the Ocean Decade and Mission Ocean initiatives and gather information on the Belgian node of the UN ECOP programme.
Automated underwaysystem eDNA sampler
Custom solutions for automating sampling methods developed at Research Infrastructure VLIZ.
Extra in Room Dactylo (third floor)
Movies
Enjoy the peace and quiet, and a loop of underwater movies.
Green screen
Want to share your attendance on your socials? Come take a picture in front of the VLIZ green screen. Place yourselves on the Simon Stevin, in the VLIZ labs, or ‘under the sea’! We will provide you with multiple options on the spot. And yes, we do have props!