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This paper presents the first record of Rickia wasmannii (Laboulbeniales) from Myrmica sabuleti in Belgium. Aspects of prevalence and thallus density of R. wasmannii are discussed, and a description and illustrations are given. Screening of the oldest colony of Lasius neglectus in Belgium (Ghent University Botanic Garden) did not reveal infections with Laboulbenia formicarum.

To advance our restricted knowledge on mosquito biodiversity and distribution in Belgium, a national inventory started in 2007 (MODIRISK) based on a random selection of 936 collection points in three main environmental types: urban, rural and natural areas. Additionally, 64 sites were selected because of the risk of importing a vector or pathogen in these sites. Each site was sampled once between May and October 2007 and once in 2008 using Mosquito Magnet Liberty Plus traps. Diversity in pre-defined habitat types was calculated using three indices. The association between species and environmental types was assessed using a correspondence analysis. Twenty-three mosquito species belonging to traditionally recognized genera were found, including 21 indigenous and two exotic species. Highest species diversity (Simpson 0.765) and species richness (20 species) was observed in natural areas, although urban sites scored also well (Simpson 0.476, 16 species). Four clusters could be distinguished based on the correspondence analysis. The first one is related to human modified landscapes (such as urban, rural and industrial sites). A second is composed of species not associated with a specific habitat type, including the now widely distributed Anopheles plumbeus. A third group includes species commonly found in restored natural or bird migration areas, and a fourth cluster is composed of forest species. Outcomes of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed sampling scheme and support the choice of the trap type. Obtained results of this first country-wide inventory of the Culicidae in Belgium may serve as a basis for risk assessment of emerging mosquito-borne diseases.

Although ostracods are important components in aquatic ecosystems, little is known about their microbiomes. Here, we analyzed the microbiomes of the putative ancient asexual ostracod species, Darwinula stevensoni, in three natural populations from different freshwater habitats in the UK, Belgium, and Spain. We applied high-throughput amplicon sequencing approaches to analyze the V3–V4 part of the bacterial 16S rRNA region. We tested for host-specific microbiomes by comparing bacterial assemblages of ostracods with those of sediment and water samples from the same locations. Around 2,200 Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) were identified from ostracod samples with universal primers and 1,700 ASVs with endosymbiotic-specific primers, illustrating a high microbiome diversity in D. stevensoni. Most bacterial taxa were unique to the microbiome of D. stevensoni as compared to other freshwater invertebrates and to non-marine ostracods. Alpha diversity of ostracod microbiomes did not differ significantly between the three populations, but PERMANOVA detected significant differences in bacterial compositions. Microbiomes varied highly among ostracod specimens from the same population. Possible factors shaping ostracod microbiomes could be latitude, food, age, and environmental variables. Preliminary functionality analyses showed that Darwinula-specific microbiomes contribute to lipid, carbohydrate, nucleotide, and amino acid metabolic processes and the synthesis of co-factors and vitamins.

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).