The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) and Meise Botanic Garden house more than 50 million specimens covering all fields of natural history. While many different research topics have their own specificities, throughout the years it became apparent that with regards to collection data management, data publication and exchange via community standards, collection holding institutions face similar challenges (James et al. 2018, Rocha et al. 2014). In the past, these have been tackled in different ways by Belgian natural history institutions. In addition to local and national collaborations, there is a great need for a joint structure to share data between scientific institutions in Europe and beyond. It is the aim of large networks and infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), the Distributed System of Scientific collections (DiSSCo) and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) to further implement and improve these efforts, thereby gaining ever increasing efficiencies. In this context, the three institutions mentioned above, submitted the NaturalHeritage project (http://www.belspo.be/belspo/brain-be/themes\_3\_HebrHistoScien\_en.stm) granted in 2017 by the Belgian Science Policy Service, which runs from 2017 to 2020. The project provides links among databases and services. The unique qualities of each database are maintained, while the information can be concentrated and exposed in a structured way via one access point. This approach aims also to link data that are unconnected at present (e.g. relationship between soil/substrate, vegetation and associated fauna) and to improve the cross-validation of data. (1) The NaturalHeritage prototype (http://www.naturalheritage.be) is a shared research portal with an open access infrastructure, which is still in the development phase. Its backbone is an ElasticSearch catalogue, with Kibana, and a Python aggregator gathering several types of (re)sources: relational databases, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) services of objects databases and bibliographical data, collections metadata and the GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit (IPT) for observational and taxonomical data. Semi-structured data in English are semantically analysed and linked to a rich autocomplete mechanism. Keywords and identifiers are indexed and grouped in four categories (“what”, “who”, “where”, “when”). The portal can act also as an Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) service and ease indexing of the original webpage on the internet with microdata enrichment. (2) The collection data management system of DaRWIN (Data Research Warehouse Information Network) of RBINS and RMCA has been improved as well. External (meta)data requirements, i.e. foremost publication into or according to the practices and standards of GBIF and OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System: https://obis.org) for biodiversity data, and INSPIRE (https://inspire.ec.europa.eu) for geological data, have been identified and evaluated. New and extended data structures have been created to be compliant with these standards, as well as the necessary procedures developed to expose the data. Quality control tools for taxonomic and geographic names have been developed. Geographic names can be hard to confirm as their lack of context often requires human validation. To address this a similarity measure is used to help map the result. Species, locations, sampling devices and other properties have been mapped to the World Register of Marine Species and DarwinCore (http://www.marinespecies.org), Marine Regions and GeoNames, the AGRO Agronomy and Vertebrate trait ontologies and the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) vocabularies (http://www.obofoundry.org/ontology/agro.html). Extensive mapping is necessary to make use of the ExtendedMeasurementOrFact Extension of DarwinCore (https://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/extensions.do).
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RBINS Staff Publications 2019
Numerous naturally CO2-rich mineral water springs, locally called ‘pouhons’, occur in southeast Belgium. These are oversaturated in CO2 (up to 4g/L) and have attracted economic, touristic and scientific interest for centuries. Water sources occur within Palaeozoic rocks of the Rhenohercynian deformation zone, a fold-and-thrust belt at the north of the Variscan orogeny in central Europe. Many occurrences are concentrated in the Cambro-Ordivician Stavelot-Venn massif. A widely accepted model, supported by H-O isotopic signatures, is that sources are primarily fed by meteoric water, which infiltrates through Quaternary sediments, then reaching Lower Palaeozoic rocks to meet the mineral and CO2 source at unknown depth. Different ideas for the origin of CO2 are grouped in two main hypotheses: a) generation by dissolution of carbonate rocks and/or nodules, and b) volcanic degassing related to the neighbouring Eifel area in Germany. These well-known interpretations are mostly based on geochemical studies that are dispersed and poorly accessible. These have now been gathered in the light of new sampling campaigns, allowing to revisit and compare the views of earlier authors. We also for the first time include the geotectonic setting of the region. Carbonate rocks in the region are represented by Lower Carboniferous and Middle Devonian limestones. Depending on the assumed structural evolution for this foreland fold-an-thrust belt, these may occur at >2 km depth below the Stavelot-Venn massif. Carbonate nodules are present in other formations, but their limited volume is unlikely to originate high and long-lived quantities of CO2. Springs enriched in CO2 are also common in the volcanic Eifel area, with presence of mantle CO2 well established. The supposed extension of the Eifel plume would allow for a magmatic CO2 source below the Stavelot-Venn massif from degassing of the plume (>50 km deep), or of an unknown shallower magmatic reservoir. Available stable and noble isotopes point to a mixed carbonate-magmatic origin. If considering the presence of limestones at depth, meteoric water should infiltrate at least 2 km. Known deep-rooted faults are thought to act as preferential groundwater pathways. However, such deep circulation is incompatible with the low temperatures of springs (~10oC), unless the ascent is slow enough to fully dissipate heat prior to resurfacing. Another possibility is that meteoric water does not infiltrate as deep, with CO2 being transported upwards to meet groundwaters at shallower depths. The presence of CO2 surface leaks, locally called ‘mofettes’, could be evidence of such relatively shallow availability of CO2. The evaluation of existing hypotheses highlights complex subsurface processes that involve water infiltration, CO2 assimilation and water resurfacing in southeast Belgium (Figure 1). As such, this review is an important guide for the newly launched sampling campaigns. Acknowledgements This work is part of two research projects: GeoConnect³d-GeoERA that has received funding by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 731166, and ROSEAU project, as part of the Walloon program «Doctorat en Entreprise», co-funded by the SPW Région Wallonne of Belgium and the company Bru-Chevron S.A. (Spadel group), under grant number 7984. References Barros, R., Defourny, A., Collignon, A., Jobé, P., Dassargues, A., Piessens, K. & Welkenhuysen, K., 2021. A review of the geology and origin of CO2 in mineral water springs in east Belgium. Geologica Belgica, 24 (1-2), p.17-31. https://doi.org/10.20341/gb.2020.023
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021
