Flanders Marine Institute

Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) promotes accumulation of marine knowledge and data in marine research in Flanders, focusing on oceans, seas, coastal and tidal systems.

The target groups for knowledge accumulation are the marine research community as well as educational institutions, the general public, policymakers and the industry (within the scope of the blue economy). Among the core activities of VLIZ are Supporting networks of marine scientists and other concerned parties, as well as representing the Flemish marine research community in the international marine scientific circles. Next to these core activities, several ongoing activities at VLIZ are highly relevant to DiSSCo. VLIZ as a member of the LifeWatch ESFRI is both the regional contributor with activities related to the observatories and data archaeology, and responsible for the development of the Species Information Backbone. Besides taxonomic information, this backbone provides access to a range of additional information, including species traits, specimen information, distributions, and habitats, linking and providing direct access to literature and to databases such as GBIF, COL, GenBank, BHL, EOL and BoLD. All activities within the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone are offered as in-kind contributions to DiSSCo: interlinking such data with collection data will broaden the research applications and potential of the collections within DiSSCo. VLIZ will contribute to DiSSCo with a marine core repository collection. This repository contains marine sediment sample collections of great importance in ocean research. They are used for research in climate, environment, many other marine geological studies, and for education.