Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp

Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp (KDMA) manages three zoological gardens in Flanders (ZOO Antwerpen, ZOO Planckendael, and ZOO Serpentarium), the De Zegge nature reserve in Geel, and the Flanders Meeting and Convention Center Antwerp.

The KMDA Centre for Research and Conservation plays a leading role in the global zoo community in terms of scientific research and conservation of threatened animal species and their habitats. In DiSSCo, KDMA will play a key role in terms of zoological living collections, as well as genetic, tissues and cell collections.. The living collections comprise 9K individual animals of 662 species, as well as an arboretum. Furthermore, they play an important role as a link with the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums (EAZA) and the wider zoo community. KMDA hosts one of the four physical locations of the EAZA BioBank. which is linked to the Zoological Information Management Software (ZIMS); one centralized online database for the global zoo community which contains many millions of individual records of about 20K different species. Their experience with the data management systems used in this domain will be valuable for the implementation of DiSSCo.