Belgian baseline distribution of invasive alien species of Union concern

The European Alien Species Information Network team (EASIN, http://easin.jrc.ec.europa.eu) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) requests the European member states to provide and verify the baseline distribution data of invasive alien species of Union Concern (Tsiamis et al. 2017) as provided by the EASIN mapping system (Katsanevakis et al. 2012). These are species with documented biodiversity impacts sensu the European Union Regulation on the prevention and management of the introduction and spread of Invasive Alien Species in Europe (IAS Regulation No 1143/2014) (European Union 2014).

The dataset provides a shapefile on the baseline distribution of the invasive species of EU concern in Belgium based on an aggregated dataset (ias_belgium_t0_xxxx).

Belgium.

Data were compiled from various datasets holding invasive species observations such as data from research institutes and research projects (76%), citizen science observatories (23%) and a range of other sources (1%) such as governmental agencies, water managers, invasive species control companies, angling and hunting organizations etc. Data were normalized using a custom mapping of the original data files to Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) where possible. Species names were mapped to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (GBIF 2016) using the species API (http://www.gbif.org/developer/species). Appropriate selection of records was performed based on predefined cut-off dates (see data range) and record content validation (see validation procedure). Data were then joined with GRID10k layer Belgium based on GRID10k cellcodes (ETRS_1989_LAEA).