The International Seabed Authority (ISA), in collaboration with the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries of the Republic of Korea (MOMAF) and the National Marine Biodiversity Institute of Korea (MABIK), will convene an online workshop on Enhancing Image-based Biodiversity Assessments to Advance Deep-Sea Taxonomy via the Microsoft Teams platform from 12 to 14 October 2021. The workshop will be conducted in two separate sessions:

The European Tracking Network (ETN) will be hosting a webinar on "Management, visualisation and spatial analyses of data" on October 13th presented by our LifeWatch INBO colleagues: Damiano Oldoni and Peter Desmet, with input of our LifeWatch VLIZ colleagues: Jan Reubens, Lennert Schepers, and Aubri Noyez.

Register and find out more here.

The Science Summit at UNGA76 is a contribution to advancing Science for the UN SDGs. Online from 14-30 Sept 2021.

LifeWatch ERIC will convene a session of the UN General Assembly Science Summit, dedicated to SDG 14, Life below Water, and SDG 15, Life on Land. 

The session will take place online on 01 October 2021, from 13:00 – 19:15 CEST, and will feature experts from all over the world. LifeWatch ERIC CEO, Christos Arvanitidis, and CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, will convene the event. 

Our LifeWatch colleagues from the WoRMS data management team are present on the (virtual) CESP 2020-006 event "taxonomic databases, species data information and visualization", organized by the Brazilian Biodiversity Information System.

On 6 and 7 September 2021, a symposium will be held at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (Grande Galerie de l'Évolution) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of FishBase and the 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase.

This symposium will be an opportunity to illustrate the different uses of FishBase and SeaLifeBase in the fields of ecology, biogeography, fisheries, taxonomy or aquariology. It will highlight the contribution of these two global information systems to the knowledge of biodiversity and the sustainable use of aquatic ecosystems, and those from various other databases.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this workshop is organized in a hybrid form.

This closed workshop is organized by sDiv, the Synthesis centre of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig.

The aim of the sDiv Working Group "sDevTrait" is to streamline development efforts in tools for ecological trait analyses.

LifeWatch Belgium partner BopCo will attend the 10th EMCA Conference “New insights into mosquito and blackfly control” and present following posters:

• A DNA-based pipeline for species-level identification of Belgian mosquitoes
• COI haplotype diversity in three exotic Aedes species in Belgium
• Population genetic structure of Aedes japonicus in Belgium suggests multiple introductions

This is an in-person international conference.

Join us on Thursday 28 October 2021 for this new inspiring annual event on biodiversity, where science meets citizens, policy and industry!

The Biodiversity Christmas Market has been postponed to spring.

The Belgian Biodiversity Platform invites you to the Biodiversity Christmas Market, an international science-policy-practice fair.

A kick-off meeting is planned on the 9th July 2021 with the aim of gathering a maximum of Southern Ocean stakeholders and setting up Working Groups for each of the Decade’s Societal Outcomes.

Working Groups will set out to identify the needs and priorities of the Southern Ocean as part of a Southern Ocean Action Plan.

To accommodate both Western and Eastern participants, the organisers will be hosting two sessions:

• Session 1 at 07:00 UTC
• Session 2 at 17:00 UTC

For subscription and more details follow the link below.