Projects

A selection of projects in which the BMDC participates or is the leading team.

IDOD (1997-2002)

IDOD stands for Integrated and Dynamical Oceanographic Data management. This project was financed by the Belgian federal Office for scientific, technical and cultural affairs (OSTC) in the frame of the first Programme for a Sustainable management of the North Sea.

The IDOD project aimed at building up a data base containing the results of the various scientific projects performed in the frame of the Programme and the measurements made during official monitoring campaigns. It lead to the IDOD Information System, made of the IDOD data base, the user interface, the spatial analysis tool and the statistical analysis tool.

The careful design of the IDOD data base makes it a versatile and robust system. The detailed overview of data characteristics and users needs which was made at the beginning of the project and updated thanks the useful comments of our Users committee allowed to implement a structure which can handle numerous types of data. The system continues therefore to be fed by data and to evolve according to the needs and the progresses of the technology.

The IDOD information system was developed in partnership with KUL-UCS and ULg-SURFACES.

 Technical description of the IDOD project (PDF, 17pp., 61KB)

 The IDOD information system

The Gilson collection (1999- )

In the years 1899-1910, G. Gilson, professor at University of Leuven and later director of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), has performed an impressive faunistic survey in the Belgian coastal waters, collecting thousands of samples with plankton nets, bottom trawls, towed dredges, etc. The aim of Gilson was to understand the relationship between the fauna and its habitat. Therefore, Gilson has further sampled sediments with his 'ground collector' and measured several abiotic parameters such as sea surface temperature, salinity, wind speed and direction, currents, etc. However, Gilson could not perform an integration of all these data. From 1902 to 1908, Gilson also conducted the Belgian oceanographic campaigns for the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).

Today, most samples and data of G. Gilson have been preserved at the RBINS. This well documented material provides an opportunity to examine the changes that occurred at the Belgian coast during the twentieth century. In particular, the changes in biodiversity resulting from both natural causes and human impacts are of great concern for the management of the Belgian marine areas. These are linked to changes in environmental parameters.

Together with the Department of Invertebrates of the RBINS, the BMDC has started to process the available data on sediments in order to produce a "historical" map of their distribution. The integration of these century-old data into the IDOD database will allow to examine the relationship between fauna and abiotic parameters at a period where human impacts and climatic conditions were different.

REVAMP (2002-2005)

REVAMP will develop an improved product from MERIS, namely an atlas containing maps of validated chlorophyll (CHL) concentrations for the North Sea. REVAMP will follow a regional approach where parts of the North Sea will be described by same algorithm with different parameters. CHL algorithms are still far from well established for turbid coastal waters (case 2). Therefore the MERIS standard neural network approach will be considered together with alternative innovative methods such as multi-spectral matrix inversion methods. To improve these approaches REVAMP will gather data in a number of relevant regions in the North Sea. In concert with the end-user REVAMP will define and produce relevant information products (Value Added Products) based on the CHL-maps.

The BMDC acts as "Project Data Manager" within this European partnership of eight institutes.

SeaDataNet

The SeaDataNet project (2006-2011) is constructing a standardized distributed system for managing the large and diverse data sets collected by the oceanographic fleets and the new automatic observation systems. It brings together a unique group of 49 major institutes and marine data centres from 35 countries bordering the North-East Atlantic, and its adjacent seas: the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Baltic, the North Sea and the Arctic. The products the consortium is developping are available through the Sea-Search portal.