From 16 to 20 October 2023, the UNESCO world heritage city of Bruges was the scene of the 34th annual meeting of the International Research Ship Operators. The meeting was organised by the Institute of Natural Sciences and the Flanders Marine Institute. 129 participants attended the meeting to share information and solve problems of common interest. Improving support for the marine scientific community’s research efforts at sea is always a key focus.
International Research Ship Operators, 16-20 October 2023, Bruges, Belgium
The International Research Ship Operators (IRSO) forum brings together research ship operators representing 49 organisations from 30 countries. Together, they operate more than 100 of the world’s leading marine science research vessels. Membership of IRSO is open to all organisations operating research ships and national research programmes that collect data from ships at sea and follow established protocols for the open publication of their results.
IRSO was founded in 1986 and since then has had annual meetings organised by and in participating countries. In 2023, the Institute of Natural Sciences, operator of the RV Belgica, and the Flanders Marine Institute, operator of the RV Simon Stevin, took care of the organisation. Together, they also guarantee the Belgian representation in IRSO. 129 participants travelled to Bruges for this 34th IRSO meeting. Besides plenary sessions and some specific workshops, which took place at the Bruges Grand Hotel Casselbergh, the programme also included some social activities. A visit to the research vessels RV Belgica and RV Simon Stevin was, of course, a must. For this occasion, both ships were docked at the Zeebrugge Naval Base on Friday 20 October.
Sharing successful experiences (best practices) in the design and operation of research vessels and scientific equipment are among the main objectives of the annual IRSO meeting.
“These meetings allow efficient sharing of information and resolution of problems of common interest. This allows the marine scientific community’s research efforts at sea to be ever better supported” clarifies Greg Foothead, chairman of IRSO and General Director of New Zealand’s NIWA Vessel Management Ltd.
Giuseppe Magnifico, IRSO vice-president and Deputy Director of the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) completes, “IRSO also acts as a voice to promote the research ship community and provides expert advice to other bodies as required.”
Additional benefits
However, IRSO also goes a step further than keeping each other informed about experiences and developments in national research fleets. “Being active within IRSO sometimes also results in actual collaborations and in the exchange of ship time and equipment between institutes and countries,” says André Cattrijsse, Head of Research Infrastructure at the Flanders Marine Institute.
“Moreover, this strategic exchange of knowledge and experience is crucial in an era of declining budgets, while the need for knowledge of coastal seas and the ocean and their relationship with humans is rapidly increasing.” stresses Lieven Naudts, coordinator of the RV Belgica and head of the Ostend Measurement Service at the Institute of Natural Sciences.
IRSO also initiates projects of common interest to its members. For example, a code of conduct for marine research vessels was developed and IRSO contributed to the creation of the OCEANIC database for research vessels at the University of Delaware. IRSO also sponsors workshops and working groups, such as the biennial International Marine Technician’s Workshop (INMARTECH).
The Belgica Documents Climate Change in an Arctic Marine Ecosystem
On the 13th of July 2023 the new Belgian oceanographic research vessel RV Belgica is leaving from Reykjavik, Iceland, for a trip of three weeks to southwest Greenland. The international research team on board will make use of the advanced facilities on board of the ship to investigate how climate change, and more specifically changes in glacial melt, will affect the carbon dynamics, biological communities and food webs in Greenlandic fjords, a typical Arctic marine ecosystem.
Fjords are systems of regional and global importance by supporting highly productive and diverse food webs. As this rich marine life stores a lot of carbon, the fjords play a far more important role as CO2 sinks than one would suspect based on their limited size relative to the vast ocean basin.
From Marine- to Land-terminating Glaciers
These days, global warming significantly impacts fjord systems through the accelerated melting of ice, with the greatest impact in polar areas such as Greenland. Here, coastal glaciers often terminate in the fjord, so called marine-terminating glaciers.
However, especially at Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers draining 88 % of the ice sheet in the study area, discharge has recently increased sharply caused by increased melting of the ice sheet. As a consequence, many of Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers are gradually shifting to land-terminating glaciers, a process which will likely intensify in the near future.
Whereas there is increasing evidence that shifts in glacier types cause major changes in the physical, biogeochemical and ecological processes in the associated fjord systems, the consequences for the marine food web and carbon burial in sediments are currently not fully understood. As a result, the impacts of further warming on ecosystem services provided by Arctic fjords (e.g. food provisioning, climate regulation) remain unknown.
This Belgica expedition aims to investigate to what extent changing glacial melts in Arctic fjords may lead to lower primary productivity and a less rich food web. The research is part of the CANOE project (Climate chANge impacts on carbon cycling and fOod wEbs in Arctic Fjords), which is funded by the Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO).
Study Area
The study area consists of two adjacent fjords with contrasting glacier input, respectively marine- and land-terminating. In both fjords, a gradient from shelf to inner fjord will be sampled. Oceanography and pelagic (water column) biogeochemistry will be described at high resolution in each fjord (oceanographic stations), in addition to the benthic (seafloor) biogeochemistry and biodiversity (basic and medium stations), while the food web will be described and quantified at two contrasting locations in each fjord (full stations).
“With this expedition the team will contribute to major societal concerns for which research-based management strategies are crucial for the future” says Ann Vanreusel, professor at the Department of Biology of Ghent University and chief scientist of the RV Belgica Greenland expedition. “By providing insights into expected climate change effects on coastal marine food webs, important information for a future ecosystem-based management in the Arctic fjords is generated.”
The CANOE project, coordinated by prof. Ulrike Braeckman (RBINS and UGent), will also construct predictive models that will help to anticipate the ongoing and future climate-related shifts in marine ecosystems and the consequences for natural resources and other ecosystem functions such as CO2 mitigation.
The Tradition of Integrated Research
Belgium has a long tradition in marine Arctic research since Adrien de Gerlache set sail with the historical Belgica in 1907 for a scientific expedition exploring parts of the Arctic Ocean. Even at that time, this involved integrating many research disciplines into the expedition, and involving scientists of different nationalities. In the spirit of this tradition, the CANOE-scientists now also use the new RV Belgica for an integrated and international research campaign, linking physical, biogeochemical and biological aspects of the water column with seafloor processes in Greenlandic fjord ecosystems with glacier dynamics under influence of climate change. Such an interdisciplinary campaign requires optimal use of the numerous oceanographic and biological research instruments offered by the RV Belgica.
The multidisciplinary international CANOE team is led by researchers from Ghent University (UGent) (Prof. Ulrike Braeckman) and also consists of researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural sciences (RBINS), Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), University of Antwerp (UAntwerp), Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and University of Bonn (Germany). The research is also carried out in association with Greenland research institutes.
CANOE is funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) as beneficiary of a specific call that was designed to give an impulsion to the start-up of research on the new RV Belgica and to allow researchers to get to know the ship and her potential. The project runs from 15 December 2021 to 15 March 2026. For more information of the project please visit http://canoe.marinetraining.eu/.
The CANOE expedition with RV Belgica follows the DEHEAT expedition that operated in Icelandic waters from 26 June to 11 July. Here, it investigated how the natural weathering of silicate minerals in the sea consumes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby helping to remove it from the atmosphere, and when accelerated could be an ally in the fight against global warming.
More information on RV Belgica can be consulted at the ship’s websites at RBINS (including live position information and webcam images) and BELSPO. The ship and its scientific activities can also be followed on Facebook and Twitter.
On 26 June 2023, an international team of scientists embarked on the first arctic mission of the new Belgian oceanographic research vessel RV Belgica. They boarded in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik and will spend 16 days in the fjords and on the continental shelf of Iceland investigating the possibilities of reducing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by enhancing the weathering of silicates in the ocean. This process has potential to contribute to the active mitigation of the ongoing global warming.
Climate change is one of the biggest global challenges of the 21st century and urgently requires ambitious, transformative, and collective action to limit global warming. In 2015, representatives from 196 countries gathered at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and signed a historic agreement to limit the increase in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
Meanwhile, however, emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) still continue to rise and have reached atmospheric concentrations that are unprecedented in at least the last 800.000 years. Humanity is now at the point where preventing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – the “conventional mitigation” – is no longer enough to achieve the ambitious goal. We also need to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using negative emission technologies to meet the targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Enhanced Silicate Weathering
One promising approach among negative emission technologies is Enhanced Silicate Weathering. This process takes advantage of the natural weathering of silicate minerals, whereby silicate dissolution consumes atmospheric carbon dioxide and therefore helps to remove it from the atmosphere.
The concept of marine Enhanced Silicate Weathering involves distributing silicate minerals onto the seafloor of coastal oceans. Recent experiments have indicated that weathering can be accelerated in this way. The idea is that the increased availability of silicates, leading to a higher alkalinity of the ocean (a higher capacity of the water to resist acidification), will enhance the uptake of carbon dioxide, thereby reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
DEHEAT
However, it is still uncertain whether the high weathering rates observed in experiments actually occur in natural environments and how efficient the process would be in drawing down carbon dioxide. To address these uncertainties, a group of researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), University of Antwerp and Université libre de Bruxelles joined forces in the project DEHEAT ‐ Natural analogues and system‐scale modeling of marine enhanced silicate weathering.
“We aim at examining, for the first time, the feasibilityand efficiency of Enhanced Silicate Weathering under marine conditions, taking advantage of the coastal ocean as a large‐scale, natural biogeochemical reactor” says DEHEAT-coordinator Sebastiaan van de Velde, of University of Antwerp and RBINS. “A second critical issue concerns the potential side‐effects on marine ecosystems, both positive andnegative”, he adds.
With RV Belgica to Iceland
To shed light on these critical knowledge gaps, the DEHEAT-team put together a dedicated scientific expedition aboard the new Belgian research vessel RV Belgica to quantify the sediment geochemistry and mineralogy at a site that serves as a natural analogue for Enhanced Silicate Weathering: the continental shelf of Iceland, which is rich in basalt. Basalt is a volcanic rock that is suitable for the envisaged research in terms of silica content and weathering speed, so Iceland is an ideal place to visit in order to reach the objectives of DEHEAT.
The team, led by Sebastiaan van de Velde and expanded with scientific expertise under the form of colleagues and equipment of Ghent University, the British Antarctic Survey (United Kingdom), Universität Bonn (Germany), University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) and University of Gothenburg (Sweden), embarked on RV Belgica on Monday 26 June in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik. They will spend 16 days in fjords and on the Icelandic continental shelf and will return to Reykjavik on 11 July 2023.
During the expedition, the highly international and interdisciplinary team not only samples water, drills into the seafloor of Iceland and measures weathering rates in the sediment but also employs computer models to simulate seafloor weathering rates around Iceland. The collected data will then inform a large-scale virtual application of Enhanced Silicate Weathering in the Belgian North Sea using the COHERENS shelf sea model, that is designed for a wide range of applications in coastal and shelf areas and of which the development is led by researchers of RBINS.
During daily briefings in the conference room of RV Belgica, DEHEAT lead researcher Sebastiaan van de Velde (central back) evaluates the work of the day and informs all scientists on the sampling actions and experiments that are planned for the next day.
A Northern First
The scientific team’s ability to carry out this mission follows from the fact that the new research vessel Belgica is equipped for such interdisciplinary research and has a high enough autonomy to remain at sea uninterrupted for a sufficiently long time. From the moment the ‘new RV Belgica’ concept was conceived, bringing Arctic waters within the scope of Belgian and European research was an important objective. In this context, the documentation and research of climate change and the development of climate change mitigation measures were obviously key objectives, among other goals. To enable operations at the edge of the pack ice during the summer season, the RV Belgica even has light ice reinforcement.
RV Belgica’s northern journey to Iceland does not stand alone. Indeed, the ship left her home port of Zeebrugge as early as 6 June, first completing an expedition led by Ghent University’s Renard Centre of Marine Geology in which the sedimentary processes (past & present) offshore southwestern Ireland were studied, including in the area of the Belgica mounds (steep-flanked underwater mountains that were discovered using the previous Belgica). After a short stop in Galway (Ireland) and the transit to Reykjavik, the DEHEAT-leg of the international adventure kicked off. Next, RV Belgica will transit to Greenland where yet another scientific team will embark under the lead of the Marine Biology Research Group of Ghent University. They will investigate how climate change, and more specifically changes in glacial melt, will affect the carbon dynamics, biological communities and food webs in Greenlandic fjords, a typical Arctic marine ecosystem (project CANOE). The return of RV Belgica to Zeebrugge is foreseen for 13 August.
DEHEAT (as well as CANOE) is funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) as beneficiary of a specific call that was designed to give an impulsion to the start-up of research on the new RV Belgica and to allow researchers to get to know the ship and her potential. DEHEAT runs from 15 December 2021 to 15 March 2026.
More information on RV Belgica can be consulted at the ship’s websites at RBINS (including live position information and webcam images) and BELSPO. The ship and its scientific activities can also be followed on Facebook and Twitter.
As part of the SEADETECT project financed by the EU LIFE programme, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences will contribute to the development and validation of an automated detection system of marine mammals to prevent collisions between ships and cetaceans.
Today, global economy is mainly based on maritime traffic which represents 80% of world trade in volume and 70% in value. This intense traffic involves a growing number of ships moving ever faster through the world’s seas and oceans, which markedly increases the risk of collision with cetaceans.
Collisions between vessels and whales often result in the death of the animals. In recent decades, shipping traffic in combination with the increased speed of individual ships has led to a doubling of the number of fatal collisions. Several studies have shown ship strikes to be the leading cause of death of cetaceans in some areas. For instance, ship strikes are the highest form of mortality for fin whales and sperm whales in the Pelagos Sanctuary in the Mediterranean Sea, an area for which France, Monaco and Italy concluded an agreement to protect marine mammals.
In the arctic, climate change is predicted to result in increased exposure of vulnerable cetacean species to collision risk. Worldwide, reductions in collision mortality will benefit whale populations which are still recovering from the effects of historic over-hunting, and continue to suffer from human induced habitat degradation.
Faced with this situation, the SEADETECT project is developing a new solution that should enable vessels to reduce collisions with cetaceans by 80%.
Preventing ship strikes
Collisions are often due to a combination of three factors: the ability to detect, the reaction time of the crew and the time it takes to maneuver the ship, all depending on the size and speed of the ship and the state of the sea. The SEADETECT project will develop three systems to reduce such collisions:
A system on board ships that will detect unidentified objects, in particular marine mammals, in real time.
A network of passive acoustic monitoring buoys located in high-risk areas at sea that will determine and triangulate the position of cetaceans in real time.
Detection data sharing software, fed by the future detections, to inform vessels in the area about the risk of hazards.
“The automatic detection and anti-collision system will be used in the existing multi-sensory infrastructure of the national oceanographic research vessel RV Belgica and will be validated by scientists of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences during the expeditions and monitoring campaigns of the ship”, Bob Rumes of the RBINS Marine Ecology and Management team (MARECO) clarifies.
The automatic detection and anti-collision system will autonomously detect cetaceans but also obstacles or floating objects such as containers to prevent collisions with ships. Thanks to a high-performance data fusion and processing system, this solution will make it possible to detect in real time a 2-metre long object on the surface at a distance of 1km, by day and night, even in complex maritime conditions (strong sea states or bad weather conditions). In addition, the researchers will also investigate the impact of a general application of this detection and anti-collision system on several target species as an alternative to other possible measures.
The SEADETECT project, led by the French Group Naval, will last four years and brings together ten partners from three European countries: Belgium, France and Italy. More information can be found on the project website: https://life-seadetect.eu/.
The LIFE programme is a financial instrument of the European Commission, dedicated to supporting innovative private and public projects in the fields of environment and climate.
From 10 May until 4 July 2023, you can visit the Nieuwe Gaanderijen in Ostend for the photo exhibition ‘Christian Clauwers: on the front line of global warming’, which focuses on the RV Belgica and marine science. All the images were made by explorer-photographer Christian Clauwers during an expedition on the Belgica, the Belgian research ship of the Federal Science Policy and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
Address: Nieuwe Gaanderijen, Koning Boudewijnpromenade (Zeedijk) z/n – 8400 Ostend
Price: free
A floating laboratory
Christian Clauwers is not only a photographer, but also an explorer, speaker and author. He has already sailed around the world twice, visited no fewer than 114 countries on all seven continents, and explored some of the planet’s most remote islands. His work focuses on the fragile relationship – and potential conflict – between humans and nature.
Scientists on the front line
Christian Clauwers was given the unique opportunity to sail on the TalPro22 expedition that set sail for the Tyrrhenian Sea. Aboard the Belgica, he captured both scientific research and the impact of the relationship between man and nature on film. The ship has more than 400 square metres of laboratory space and carries several high-tech oceanographic measuring instruments. For example, the rozette, a cylindrical structure from which sampling tubes and measuring equipment hang, can be lowered to a depth of up to 5,000 metres. It takes two hours to bring the measuring instrument back up, and this in conditions that can change rapidly. The ship is equipped with satellite technology that allows it to hold position to within a metre, even in the most difficult weather conditions. The photos let us take a look behind the scenes of these impressive experiments.
A must-see for anyone concerned about the future of our planet
But the expo is more than just looking at pretty pictures. Facing the sea, it is a call-to-action to take the fragility of our planet seriously.
Christian Clauwers: ” I want to give people the chance to witness what nature has to offer us and at the same time show them how precious it is. The series on the Belgica expresses this very nicely, because the scientific research carried out there makes that fragility of nature measurable. The scientists on board measure what I try to photograph, and now I photograph what they measure. It’s an exchange where the arrow goes both ways and that’s what makes it so fascinating.”
The expo shows the consequences of the human footprint and what is at stake if we do not act to tackle climate change. It is an impressive and inspiring example of how images can be used to raise awareness and change the world.
After White-beaked dolphins were observed more frequently in Belgian waters in the early 21st century, the species recently became rarer again locally. Indeed, sightings of groups on 23 June and 14 December 2022 represent the first sightings of living White-beaked dolphins in Belgian waters since April 2018. On both dates, the animals were seen from the new research vessel RV Belgica.
On Thursday 23 June 2022, a group of around ten White-beaked dolphins was spotted from the research vessel RV Belgica in the Belgian part of the North Sea. The dolphins were seen about 5 km off the coast of Knokke, while the ship was en route to her baptizing ceremony in the god city of Ghent. The animals swam in a westerly direction, regularly emerging above the water. Present ILVO researchers identified the dolphins as White-beaked dolphins, which was confirmed by a video that Belgian Navy Lieutenant-Commander Ilja Van Hespen was able to record showing the distinctive white snout and light flank markings with dark saddle.
On Wednesday 14 December 2022, researchers from INBO and RBINS were the privileged witnesses. Initially, some ten dolphins were spotted about 42 km from the Belgian coastline (measured perpendicular to the coast, this was at the level of Ostend), and they were already suspected to be White-beaked dolphins. Only when two individuals approached the ship closer a while later could this be substantiated, and also photographically documented by Hilbran Verstraete (INBO).
Distribution
The White-beaked dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris) occurs in cold temperate and subarctic waters of the North Atlantic, mostly confined to zones less than 1,000 m deep. Its range extends from the east coast of North America (northwards from Cape Cod), through southern Greenland and the waters around Iceland, to the European west coast from northern France to Svalbard. In the North Sea, they are found almost exclusively in the central and northern parts, where the population was estimated at 20,000 animals in 2016 (Hammond et al.; 2017). In the southern North Sea, the species leans towards the limit of its range and White-beaked dolphins are a more irregular occurrence. The White-beaked dolphin is rare in the English Channel.
More numerous and rare again
In the early 21st century, particularly between 2003 and 2011, the species seems to have been less rare in the southern North Sea for a while (Haelters et al.; 2018). In the period 2009-2018, 62 sightings of White-beaked dolphins were recorded in the Belgian part of the North Sea (Haelters et al.; 2019), with undoubtedly some double-counting, but in the last years of this time interval, the number of sightings experienced a sharp decrease to only 1-3 cases per year, with also some sightings just outside the Belgian North Sea area (Haelters et al.; 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). Within the Belgian dataset, a clear peak can be observed in the first half of the year (January – May), but observations from almost all other months are also known. For the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, however, no more certain Belgian sightings of live White-beaked dolphins are known (Haelters et al.; 2020, 2021, 2022), two specimens on 19 April 2018 concerned the last sighting. Until the groups of 23 June and 14 December 2022. The White-beaked dolphin thus seems to have retreated more northwards again, possibly a consequence of climate change and its associated effects on the distribution of their prey (IJsseldijk et al.; 2018).
Strandings
Dead White-beaked dolphins washed ashore (or floating at sea) have also recently become rarer in the southern North Sea. While between 2000 and 2013 an average of one White-beaked dolphin washed ashore annually in Belgium, only three cases have been known since then (29 November 2017 Oostduinkerke, 17 May 2018 De Panne and 4 March 2020 at sea off Middelkerke) (Haelters et al.; 2018, 2019, 2021). A decrease in strandings was also observed in the Netherlands (Keijl, 2016), after it was previously noted that the Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) disappeared from stranding lists at the beginning of the 21st century, coinciding with the increasing frequency of the White-beaked dolphin (Camphuysen & Peet; 2006). Whether in the southern North Sea there is actually a link between the opposite trends of the Bottlenose dolphin (which has recently also been noted more regularly in Belgium) and the White-beaked dolphin, however, we do not wish to infer from this.
Literature
Camphuysen, C.J. & Peet, G.H., 2006. Whales and dolphins of the North Sea. Fontaine Uitgevers BV, ’s Graveland, The Netherlands.
Haelters, J., Kerckhof, F., Jauniaux, T., Potin, M., Rumes, B. & Degraer, S., 2016a. Zeezoogdieren in België in 2014 [Marine mammals in Belgium in 2014]. MARECO rapport 16/01. 29 pp.
Haelters, J., T. Jauniaux, F. Kerckhof, M. Potin & T. Vandenberghe, 2016b. Zeezoogdieren in België in 2015 [Marine mammals in Belgium in 2015]. Rapport BMM 16/01 – MARECO 16/03. 26 pp.
Haelters, J., F. Kerckhof, B. Rumes, M. Potin & T. Jauniaux, 2017. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren en opmerkelijke vissen in België in 2016 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals and some remarkable fish species in Belgium in 2016]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel. 30 pp.
Haelters, J., F. Kerckhof, K. Moreau, M. Potin, M. Doom & T. Jauniaux, 2018. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren en opmerkelijke vissen in België in 2017 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals and some remarkable fish species in Belgium in 2017]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel. 30 pp.
Haelters, J., F. Kerckhof, K. Moreau, B. Rumes, M. Potin, T. Jauniaux & D. Vercayie, 2019. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren en opmerkelijke andere soorten in België in 2018 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals and remarkable other species in Belgium in 2018]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel. 34 pp.
Haelters, J., F. Kerckhof, K. Moreau, B. Rumes, Team SeaLife, T. Jauniaux & P. Cornillie, 2020. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren en opmerkelijke andere soorten in België in 2019 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals and remarkable other species in Belgium in 2019]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel. 34 pp.
Haelters, J., F. Kerckhof, K. Moreau, Team SeaLife, E. Lambert & T. Jauniaux, 2021. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren en opmerkelijke andere soorten in België in 2020 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals and remarkable other species in Belgium in 2020]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel. 34 pp.
Haelters, J., Moreau, K., Team SeaLife, Jauniaux, T. & Kerckhof, F., 2022. Strandingen en waarnemingen van zeezoogdieren in België in 2021 [Strandings and sightings of marine mammals in Belgium in 2021]. Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (KBIN), Brussel.
Hammond, P.S., Lacey, C., Gilles, A., Viquerat, S., Börjesson, P., Herr, H., Macleod, K., Ridoux, V. & Santos, M.B., 2017. Estimates of cetacean abundance in European Atlantic waters in summer 2016 from the SCANS-III aerial and shipboard surveys. Sea Mammal Research Unit, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.
IJsseldijk, L.L., Brownlow, A., Davison, N.J., Deaville, R., Haelters, J., Keijl, G., Siebert, U. & ten Doeschate, M.T.I., 2018. Spatio-temporal trends in white-beaked dolphin strandings along the North Sea coast from 1991-2017. Lutra 61(1): 153-163.
Keijl, 2016. Jaaroverzicht walvisstrandingen 2016. Gedownload van www.walvisstrandingen.nl, 28 maart 2017. Naturalis, Nederland.
