The 4DEMON project was designed to build quality-checked, intercalibrated and integrated data sets on the marine environment in the Belgian Continental Shelf (BCS), and use this data for assessing environmental change in this area.

A network for marine optics measurements in turbid waters.

Data gathered from different regions (North Sea, Gironde, La Plata, Mediterranean) are used to test models to retrieve turbidity from reflectance.

In lowland tropical forests, ants play a variety of trophic functions in green food webs but their abundance and diversity decrease with elevation. How these functions are altered by elevation and how ants are replaced by other key arthropod taxa remain poorly studied due to the difficulty to determine ant diet by direct observations.

Whether jellyfish occurrence is increasing worldwide is still under debate. In the Belgian continental shelf, the occurrence of jellyfish swarms may be problematic for at least two reasons: tourism and marine ecology. In the summer 2013, many people have suffered from jellyfish’s stinger during recreation at the seaside in Belgium.

EUROFLEETS2 will enhance integration through specific actions aimed at consolidating the organization, methodology and tools initiated during EUROFLEETS1 and through operational initiatives towards more integrated, interoperable and cost effective European fleets for the benefit of academic, industrial and operational marine research.

Sustainable governance of our biological resources demands reliable scientific knowledge to be accessible and applicable to the needs of society.