VIS - Fishes in estuarine waters in Flanders, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) and described in Brosens et al. 2015 (https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.475.8556). The dataset contains over 70,000 fish occurrences sampled between 1992 and 2012 from almost 50 locations in the estuaries of the river Yser and the river Scheldt, in Flanders, Belgium. The dataset includes 69 fish species, as well as a number of non-target crustacean species. The data are retrieved from the Fish Information System (VIS), a database set up to monitor the status of fishes and their habitats in Flanders and are collected in support of the Water Framework Directive, the Habitat Directive, certain red lists, and biodiversity research. Additional information, such as measurements, absence information and abiotic data are available upon request. Issues with the dataset can be reported at https://github.com/LifeWatchINBO/data-publication/tree/master/datasets/vis-estuarine-occurrences
Length and weight measurement data of the individual fishes, absence information, occurrence data since 2013, as well as abiotic data of the sampling points (pH, temperature, etc.) are not included in the Darwin Core Archive and are available upon request.
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.inbo.be/en/norms-for-data-use) and provide a link to the original dataset (https://doi.org/10.15468/estwpt) 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 know how you have used or visualized the data, or to provide more information, so please contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata, opendata@inbo.be or https://twitter.com/LifeWatchINBO.