geo.be Metadata Catalog
geo.be Metadata Catalog (National Geographic Institute)
Continents, countries, sea regions of the world.
The law of 13 June 1969 defines “Belgian Continental Shelf” as follows: the seabed and the subsoil of the marine areas adjacent to the Belgian coast but beyond the Belgian territorial sea.
Dataset is quality assured. Dataset corresponds to a digitized version of the information published in the Belgian official gazette ("Belgisch staatsblad/Moniteur belge"). Only the information published in the official gazette has legal validity.
Beach Litter collected in 2023-2024 by citizen science association the Proper Strand Lopers
Beach Litter count data collected across 10 beaches of the Belgian coast in 2023 and 2024 by volunteers of the citizen science association Proper Strand Lopers. One of the key indicators of abundance, composition and trends of litter in the marine environment is the amount on beaches. OSPAR monitors litter on 100m stretches at over 70 beaches in the North-East Atlantic following common monitoring guidelines. The monitoring records litter in 112 predefined litter items in 11 types: Plastic / polystyrene, Metal, Paper and cardboard, Wood, Sanitary waste, Cloth, Rubber, Glass, Pottery/ceramics, Medical waste and Faeces.
Volunteers clean a defined area of 100 metres in 10 beach municipalities on the Belgian coast four times a year, and meticulously record what has been cleared. Macrolitter items are identified based on the Joint List of Litter Categories for Marine Macrolitter Monitoring.
View Service (WMS) for Synoptic observations
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Summer and winter mean relative humidity given in %. The relative humidity fields are available for the present target year 1975, which corresponds to the middle of the 30-year period 1961-1990.
climate projections,Belgium,Representative Concentration Pathway,high resolution
Meteorology, weather and radiation conditions
•The custodian of the resource holds the rights of property (including the rights of intellectual property) to the geographic files •The custodian grants the user the right to use the data for his internal use. •Commercial use of the data under any form is strictly forbidden •Custodian’s name must be mentioned each time the data are being used publically.
In the follow-up Belspo funded 'CICADA' project (2019-2021, https://www.belspo.be/belspo/brain-be/projects/FinalReports/CICADAbe_FinRep.pdf), these Belgian climate model projections were used to adjust the spread of climate change signals based on the larger model ensemble of all available CMIP5 Global Climate Model runs (https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/mips/cmip5/) and EURO-CORDEX Regional Climate Model runs (https://euro-cordex.net/060378/index.php.en). This multi-model ensemble of climate change signals or factors were used to apply a statistical downscaling or more specifically a quantile perturbation method on the observational climate grid from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. From those ensembles, 5th, 50th, and 95th percentiles of changes, corresponding to a mean (50th percentiles) and high (5th or 95th percentiles) impact scenario, were obtained for the variables: precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, global solar radiation and potential evapotranspiration.
Foreign real estate - Owners' profile corresponds to the dataset describing the profile of Belgian taxpayers (natural persons) holding real estate abroad. This dataset is composed of five classes. The first shows, at national level, by age and sex category, the number of individuals holding a real right that allows enjoyment over foreign property, the total number of foreign properties held by these individuals, and the number of properties by foreign country or territory. The number of properties takes into account the shares actually held. The second class presents this information at the level of the three regions. The following classes do the same for provinces, arrondissements and communes. The dataset is freely downloadable as zipped CSV files.
The licence is fully available in French (https://finances.belgium.be/sites/default/files/Licence_plan_opendata_FR.PDF) or in Dutch (https://financien.belgium.be/sites/default/files/Licentie_plan_opendata_NL.PDF).
Foreign real estate - Owners' profile is based on the database of foreign cadastral income as well as from the contents of the database of natural persons. The former contains data declared by Belgian taxpayers holding real rights on real estate located abroad. On the basis of the data declared, the FPS Finance sets a cadastral income for each property abroad. The second database contains, for each individual, information from the National Register, the authentic source for Belgian individuals and foreigners domiciled in Belgium.
Chlorophyll a concentration dataset in support of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) Descriptor 5 (D05C02, 2018 Reporting)
This dataset is part of the 2018 Belgian submission for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) linked to descriptor 5, criterion 2. This dataset contains the average of the 90th percentile chlorophyll a concentration during the growing season (march-october) in the Belgian part of the North Sea for the years 2011-2016. Chlorophyll a concentration (Chl) was generated from satellite daily data from ocean colour sensors. Data is supplied at approximately 1 km resolution on a geographical grid with equal spacing in longitude and latitude covering the described region.
Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 of 21 December 2022 laying down a list of specific high-value datasets and the arrangements for their publication and re-use (Text with EEA relevance)
Greater North Sea, incl. the Kattegat and the English Channel
(Criteria) D5C2 - Chlorophyll a concentration
Chlorophyll a concentration (Chl) was generated from daily data from ocean colour sensors (i.e. SeaWiFS, MODIS, MERIS, VIIRS) for the years 1998-2017. The algorithms used to derive data from the satellite sensors correspond to the best available algorithms given the optical characteristics of the considered water (i.e. turbid and clear waters). We started from a collection of well-validated operational satellite-based chlorophyll products for the Greater North Sea: 1) CMEMS nr. 67 product where Chl is estimated from the OC5ci algorithm, a combination of OCI (Hu, Lee & Franz, 2012) and OC5 (Gohin, F., et al., 2008.), developed at PML and 2) red-NIR ratio algorithm developed by Gons et al. (2002, 2005) for eutrophic and turbid waters applied to remote sensing reflectance obtained by Envisat-MERIS (MEGS 8.1 processing). For each of these products it was determined for which water types, described in terms remote sensing reflectance (Rrs) spectra, they provided the most accurate chlorophyll estimations based on a variety of reference datasets from the CCRR project (Nechad et al., 2015). These reference data sets were specifically designed to test algorithms and assess their accuracy for retrieving water quality parameters such as Chl concentration. In the next phase of the Chl product generation, a blending process is applied to join chlorophyll-a datasets based on best suited algorithm/water type combination. Quality control has been applied according to the standard satellite product confidence flags for the MEGS8.1 processor, and a specialized flagging approach designed for the OC5ci and Gons algorithms. The original NetCDF file result has been converted into shapefile. The data is then dynamically made available through WFS and statically converted to an INSPIRE-compliant GML file. The INSPIRE EEA 1kmx1km reference grid has been used.
Sediment biogechemistry and granulometry
UNDER EMBARGO - This dataset contains the data on porewater nutrients, sediment granulometry, and pigment concentrations that were collected in the C-power offshore wind farm in spring, summer, and autumn of 2022 for the OUTFLOW project. Data were gathered at increasing distances from the scour protection layer (SPL) of a wind turbine, 7, 15, 25, and 75 m away from the edge. Cores were collected by divers, and a boxcore was used for samples 75 m away. From these cores, porewater nutrients were collected with rhizon samplers, and cores were slices in 0.5 to 2 cm slices, and each slice was analyzed for total organic carbon, total nitrogen, granulometry, and algal pigment concentrations.
Data are as they are as received from the analytical laboratory of the marine biology department of Ghent University. All data is reported per individual replicate
UV Index derived from spectral measurements with a Brewer UV spectrophotometer. This product is not publically available yet.
Every two year the spectrophotometers are calibrated by an external company. A 1000W NIST-traceable reference lamp is used to make an absolute calibration. For the absolute UV calibration small 50W lamps are used once a month to verify the calibration level.
INSPIRE download service for the IDOD database-WFS
INSPIRE compliant download service for geographic information of marine datasets made available by the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS) in the IDOD (Integrated and Dynamical Oceanographic Database) database.
The composite is produced every 5 minutes using the reflectivity data from the Wideumont and Jabbeke weather radars. This product is not publicly available yet.
The rainfall composite combines 2D products from the Wideumont, Jabbeke and Zaventem weather radars. Reflectivity values are converted into rainrates using the Marshall-Palmer relation. For each pixel, the maximum value of the three products is taken. The effective coverage of the composite is smaller than the bounding box. It is determined by the maximum ranges of the three radars, i.e. 250 km for Wideumont, 300 km for Jabbeke, and 250 km for Zaventem.
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Directorate Natural Environment (OD Nature), Belgian Marine Data Centre (BMDC)
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS)
Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS), Directorate Natural Environment (OD Nature), Belgian Marine Data Centre (BMDC)
Federal Public Service Health, Food chain safety and Environment - DG Environment, Marine Environment Service
Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium
FPS Finance - General Administration of Patrimonial Documentation (GAPD)
Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS), Directorate Natural Environment (OD Nature), Management Unit of the North Sea Mathematical Models (MUMM)
Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ)
Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, Directorate Natural Environment, GeoCell