Location
VLIZ's headquarters are located at Jacobsenstraat 1, on the Oosteroever in Ostend, within the InnovOcean Campus. This building is shared with the marine division of the Institute for Agricultural, Fisheries, and Food Research (ILVO), as well as several partners affiliated with VLIZ, including the IOC Project Office for IODE, the European Marine Board Secretariat, the EMODnet Secretariat, the Kusterfgoed heritage cell, and the Coastal Regional Office of the Province of West Flanders. The facility offers extensive meeting spaces and serves as the base for VLIZ's scientific and technical activities.
Additionally, VLIZ manages the Marine Station Ostend (MSO) at Slipwaykaai in the Ostend harbor. This complex includes laboratories, a testing center for marine robots (the Marine Robotics Centre), and various technical workspaces. Researchers, students, and technicians collaborate here on diverse projects, ranging from biological experiments to maritime archaeological studies.
The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It first met in Paris at UNESCO Headquarters from 19 to 27 October 1961. Initially, 40 States became members of the commission. The IOC assists governments to address their individual and collective ocean and coastal management needs, through the sharing of knowledge, information and technology as well as through the co-ordination of programs and building capacity in ocean and coastal research, observations and services.
Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) is a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). OAR is also referred to as NOAA Research.
The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), a federal research laboratory, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), located in Miami in the United States. AOML's research spans tropical cyclone and hurricanes, coastal ecosystems, oceans and human health, climate studies, global carbon systems, and ocean observations. It is one of seven NOAA Research Laboratories (RLs).
The Census of Marine Life was a 10-year, US $650 million scientific initiative, involving a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations, engaged to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. The world's first comprehensive Census of Marine Life — past, present, and future — was released in 2010 in London. Initially supported by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the project was successful in generating many times that initial investment in additional support and substantially increased the baselines of knowledge in often underexplored ocean realms, as well as engaging over 2,700 different researchers for the first time in a global collaborative community united in a common goal, and has been described as "one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted".
The Northern Gulf Institute (NGI) is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Institute started in October 2006. It is one of 20 NOAA Cooperative Institutes (CIs). The NGI is a partnership of six academic institutions and NOAA. The collaboration led by Mississippi State University (MSU), includes the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), Louisiana State University (LSU), Florida State University (FSU), the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL). The NGI defines the Northern Gulf of Mexico region as the upland, watershed, coastal zone, and coastal ocean areas from the Sabine River in Louisiana east to the Suwannee River in Florida.
The Coral Triangle (CT) is a roughly triangular area in the tropical waters around Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. This area contains at least 500 species of reef-building corals in each ecoregion. The Coral Triangle is located between the Pacific and Indian oceans and encompasses portions of two biogeographic regions: the Indonesian-Philippines Region, and the Far Southwestern Pacific Region. As one of eight major coral reef zones in the world, the Coral Triangle is recognized as a global centre of marine biodiversity and a global priority for conservation. Its biological resources make it a global hotspot of marine biodiversity. Known as the "Amazon of the seas", it covers 5.7 million square kilometres (2,200,000 sq mi) of ocean waters. It contains more than 76% of the world's shallow-water reef-building coral species, 37% of its reef fish species, 50% of its razor clam species, six out of seven of the world's sea turtle species, and the world's largest mangrove forest. The epicenter of that coral diversity is found in the Bird’s Head Seascape of Indonesian Papua, which hosts 574 species. In 2014, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) reported that the gross domestic product of the marine ecosystem in the Coral Triangle is roughly $1.2 trillion per year and provides food to over 120 million people. According to the Coral Triangle Knowledge Network, the region annually brings in about $3 billion in foreign exchange income from fisheries exports, and another $3 billion from coastal tourism revenues.
The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a taxonomic database that aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive catalogue and list of names of marine organisms.
The Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung (ZMT) in Bremen is a German institute for research and developments for tropical and subtropical coastal areas and ecosystems.
The South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) is a science network of people, organisations and, most importantly observation platforms, that perform Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) in South Africa and its surrounding oceans. The SAEON is of global importance as an innovative approach in ecology to understand environmental change and to determine the impact of anthropogenic forces at multiple scales but it is a remarkably complex challenge to statistically discern between ubiquitous natural variability and exogenous forcing. The SAEON constitutes a national government response to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth Summit 2002) and is a component of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations). The SAEON has become the leader in environmental science and observation in South Africa, but has been criticised for taking a long time to establish, a situation which was inevitable in view of SAEON's multiple stakeholder corps. It has also been raised that the cost of replicated experimental treatments across SAEON sites will be high.
The RV Zeeleeuw was a marine research vessel owned, maintained, and operated by VLOOT dab. The Flanders Marine Institute took care of the coordination of the scientific program and managed the research equipment.
Tundi Spring Agardy is a marine conservationist and the founder of Sound Seas – a Washington DC–based group specializing in working at the nexus of marine science and policy in order to safeguard ocean life.
The European Marine Board is a pan-European network comprising national organizations engaged in marine research. Its members include research funding organizations, such as research councils and ministries; research performing organizations like national marine research institutes; and nationally based consortia of higher education institutes, including university consortia.
RV Simon Stevin is used to perform coastal oceanographic research in the Southern Bight of the North Sea and in the eastern part of the English Channel. It also serves as training platform for students from marine scientific and maritime studies and as a test platform for new marine and maritime technologies. Pupils and students from primary and secondary schools are offered the opportunity to step aboard for educational excursions.
MarBEF Data System was a project of the European Union's Network of Excellence which served as a platform to integrate and disseminate knowledge and expertise on marine biodiversity, with informative links to researchers, industry, stakeholders and the general public. The program was funded by the EU and formally ended in 2009. The data system's online Register of Resources (RoR) includes the details of over 1,000 European marine biology experts and their affiliated institutions and publications.
Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) is a regional professional, non-governmental, non-profit, membership organization, registered in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The organization is dedicated to promoting the educational, scientific and technological development of all aspects of marine sciences throughout the region of Western Indian Ocean (Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Comoros, Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius, Réunion (France)), with a view toward sustaining the use and conservation of its marine resources. The association has about 1000 individual members as well as about 50 institutional members from within and outside the region.
Angelika Brandt is the world leader in Antarctic deep-sea biodiversity and has developed, organised and led several oceanographic expeditions to Antarctica, notably the series of ANDEEP cruises, which have contributed significantly to Antarctica and deep-sea biology. Brandt was the senior scientist of ANDEEP which was devoted entirely to benthic research in the Antarctic abyss.
John Frederick Matthews ("Fred") Grassle was an American marine biologist, oceanographer, professor, and distinguished research scientist, notable for early work on the communities associated with deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and for his involvement in the creation of the Census of Marine Life and the first integration of marine biological data on a global scale, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System.
The Marine biodiversity of South Africa is the variety of living organisms that live in the seas off the coast of South Africa. It includes genetic, species and ecosystems biodiversity in a range of habitats spread over a range of ecologically varied regions, influenced by the geomorphology of the seabed and circulation of major and local water masses, which distribute both living organisms and nutrients in complex and time-variable patterns.
The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), formerly Ocean Biogeographic Information System, is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living species in the ocean. It was developed as the information management component of the ten year Census of Marine Life (CoML) (2001-2010), but is not limited to CoML-derived data, and aims to provide an integrated view of all marine biodiversity data that may be made available to it on an open access basis by respective data custodians. According to its web site as at July 2018, OBIS "is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development." 8 specific objectives are listed in the OBIS site, of which the leading item is to "Provide [the] world's largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format".
Anthony J. J. ("Tony") Rees is a British-born software developer, data manager and biologist resident in Australia since 1986, and previously a data manager with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He is responsible for developing a number of software systems currently used in science data management and biodiversity informatics, including c-squares, Taxamatch, and IRMNG, the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera. He has also been closely involved with the development of other biodiversity informatics initiatives including the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), AquaMaps, and the iPlant Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS). Prior to his involvement in data management, he worked as a light and electron microscopist studying freshwater and marine phytoplankton, and microfossils.
