Invasive species - American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) in Flanders, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). The dataset contains over 7,500 occurrences (25% of which are American bullfrogs) sampled between 2010 until now, in the months April to October. The data are compiled from different sources at the INBO, but most of the occurrences were collected through fieldwork for the EU co-funded Interreg project INVEXO (http://www.invexo.eu). In this project, research was conducted on different methods for the management of American bullfrog populations, an alien invasive species in Belgium. Captured bullfrogs were almost always removed from the environment and humanely killed, while the other occurrences are recorded bycatch, which were released upon catch (see bibliography for detailed descriptions of the methods). Therefore, caution is advised when using these data for trend analysis, distribution range calculation, or other. Issues with the dataset can be reported at https://github.com/LifeWatchINBO/data-publication/tree/master/datasets/invasive-bullfrog-occurrences
We strongly believe an open attitude is essential for tackling the IAS problem (Groom et al. 2015). 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 it 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/10.15468/2hqkqn) 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.