Vlinderdatabank - Butterflies in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium

Vlinderdatabank - Butterflies in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) and described in Maes et al. 2016 (https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.585.8019). The dataset contains over 761.000 butterfly occurrences of 70 species, compiled by the INBO in cooperation with the Butterfly working group of Natuurpunt (Vlinderwerkgroep). The occurrences are georeferenced using the centroid of their respective 5 x 5 km² Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid cell and are derived from the database Vlinderdatabank at the INBO, which consists of (historical) collection and literature data (1830-2001), for which all butterfly specimens in institutional and available personal collections were digitized and all entomological and other relevant publications were checked for butterfly distribution data. It also contains observations and monitoring data for the period 1991-2014. (erratum 2021, the monitoring data is moved to https://doi.org/10.15468/wwrgcd) The latter type were collected by a (small) butterfly monitoring network where butterflies were recorded using a standardized protocol. Together with the dataset Vanreusel et al. (2016, https://doi.org/10.15468/ezfbee), the dataset represents the most complete overview of butterflies in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region (north Belgium). Information withheld: in the original database, the observer’s name and the exact XY-coordinates are known. To allow anyone to use this dataset, we have released the data to the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). We would appreciate however, if you read and follow these norms for data use (http://www.inbo.be/en/norms-for-data-use) and provide a link to the original dataset (https://doi.org/10.15468/njgbmh) whenever possible. If you use these data for a scientific paper, please cite the dataset following the applicable citation norms and/or consider us for co-authorship. We are always interested to know how you have used or visualized the data, or to provide more information, so please contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata, [email protected] or https://twitter.com/LifeWatchINBO.