Search publications of the members of the Royal Belgian institute of natural Sciences
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Description of a new species of Platypalpus of the candicans - cursitans subgroup from the Peloponnesus, Greece (Diptera: Hybotidae, Tachydromiinae)
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Description of a peculiar new species of the genus Platypalpus Macquart, 1827 (Diptera: Hybotidae) from the Caucasus
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Two new Drapetis species (Diptera: Hybotidae) from Sweden
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Review of two Tonnoir moth fly species, overlooked for a century (Diptera: Psychodidae: Psychodinae)
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New insights into the marine contribution to ancient Easter Islanders' diet
- Easter Island (or Rapa Nui), internationally renowned for its megalithic statues, is the most isolated inhabited island of the Pacific. Archaeological surveys undertaken fromthe end of the 19th century led to the discovery of the remains of several hundred human individuals. The majority were buried in monuments (funerary stone platform called ahu) or in caves. This paper presents a study of the ancient Easter Islanders' diet through carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of human tooth and bone collagen and, more particularly, evaluates the impact of gender, age, social status and location of burials. The 125 studied individuals are from 16 sites, which date mainly fromthe 17th to the 19th centuries. This anthropological material is housed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural sciences and the Father Sebastián Englert Anthropological Museum of Easter Island. One hundred and seven individuals showed well-preserved collagen. The stable isotope data provide new information on ancient Easter Islander dietary habits. They demonstrate gender disparity in access to food resources and show that children were breastfed until 3 years of age. Furthermore, the isotopic signatures cluster according to the place of burial (ahu) indicating family dietary specificities. Finally, our study reveals influences of social status on food intake: individuals from Ahu Nau Nau, which is said to be the royal ahu, display the highest nitrogen and carbon isotope values. A greater consumption of marine products may explain this distinction.
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Offshore renewable energy development in the Belgian part of the North Sea
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Executive summary: Empirical evidence inspiring priority monitoring, research and management
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Documentering van de tijdelijke ontsluiting 'groeve Ampe te Egem, Pittem'
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The thermal properties of the Mercia Mudstone Group
- The Mercia Mudstone Group (MMG) crops out extensively across England and Wales and its thermal properties are required for the design of infrastructure such as ground source heating and cooling schemes and electrical cable conduits. Data from the literature and new data from a borehole core have been compiled to generate an updated range of thermal conductivities related to rock type and the lithostratigraphy. These indicate a total range in saturated vertical thermal conductivity of 1.67– 3.24 W m−1 K−1, comprising 1.67–2.81 W m−1 K−1 for mudstones, 2.12–2.41 W m−1 K−1 for siltstones and 2.3–3.24 W m−1 K−1 for sandstones. These data are all from measurements on samples and there will be uncertainty when considering the thermal properties of the rock mass owing to micro- and macrostructural features. Geometric mean modelling of thermal conductivity based on mineralogy has overestimated the thermal conductivity. Correction factors for the modelled thermal conductivities have been calculated to allow a first estimate of MMG thermal conductivities when only mineralogical data are available. Measured thermal diffusivities from the borehole core were in the range of 0.63–3.07 × 10−6 m2 s−1 and are the first measured thermal diffusivities to be reported for the MMG.
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Morphological evidence for early dog domestication in the European Pleistocene: New evidence from a randomization approach to group differences
- The antiquity of the wolf/dog domestication has been recently pushed back in time from the Late Upper Paleolithic (~14,000 years ago) to the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP; ~36,000 years ago). Some authors questioned this early dog domestication claiming that the putative (EUP) Paleolithic dogs fall within the morphological range of recent wolves. In this study, we reanalyzed a data set of large canid skulls using unbalanced‐ and balanced‐randomized discriminant analyses to assess whether the putative Paleolithic dogs are morphologically unique or whether they represent a subsample of the wolf morpho‐population. We evaluated morphological differences between 96 specimens of the 4 a priori reference groups (8 putative Paleolithic dogs, 41 recent northern dogs, 7 Pleistocene wolves, and 40 recent northern wolves) using discriminant analysis based on 5 ln‐transformed raw and allometrically size‐adjusted cranial measurements. Putative Paleolithic dogs are classified with high accuracies (87.5 and 100.0%, cross‐validated) and randomization experiment suggests that these classification rates cannot be exclusively explained by the small and uneven sample sizes of reference groups. It indicates that putative Upper Paleolithic dogs may represent a discrete canid group with morphological signs of domestication (a relatively shorter skull and wider palate and braincase) that distinguish them from sympatric Pleistocene wolves. The present results add evidence to the view that these specimens could represent incipient Paleolithic dogs that were involved in daily activities of European Upper Paleolithic forager groups.
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Antarctic ecosystem responses following ice-shelf collapse and iceberg calving: Science review and future research
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La pointe de lance d’Ivoz-Ramet (commune de Flémalle, prov. de Liège) revisitée. Une armature du début du Bronze final draguée dans la Meuse.
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EVOSHEEP: the makeup of sheep breeds in the ancient Near East
- The EVOSHEEP project combines archaeozoology, geometric morphometrics and genetics to study archaeological sheep assemblages dating from the sixth to the first millennia BC in eastern Africa, the Levant, the Anatolian South Caucasus, the Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia. The project aims to understand changes in the physical appearance and phenotypic characteristics of sheep and how these related to the appearance of new breeds and the demand for secondary products to supply the textile industry.
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Eurhinodelphinids from the early Miocene of Peru: first unambiguous records of these hyper-longirostrine dolphins outside the North Atlantic realm
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Exploring the bushmeat market in Brussels, Belgium: a clandestine luxury business
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Atmospheric correction of Sentinel-3/OLCI data for mapping of suspended particulate matter and chlorophyll-a concentration in Belgian turbid coastal waters
- The performance of different atmospheric correction algorithms for the Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) on board of Sentinel-3 (S3) is evaluated for retrieval of water-leaving radiance reflectance, and derived parameters chlorophyll-a concentration and turbidity in turbid coastal waters in the Belgian Coastal Zone (BCZ). This is performed using in situ measurements from an autonomous pan-and-tilt hyperspectral radiometer system (PANTHYR). The PANTHYR provides validation data for any satellite band between 400 and 900 nm, with the deployment in the BCZ of particular interest due to the wide range of observed Near-InfraRed (NIR) reflectance. The Dark Spectrum Fitting (DSF) atmospheric correction algorithm is adapted for S3/OLCI processing in ACOLITE, and its performance and that of 5 other processing algorithms (L2-WFR, POLYMER, C2RCC, SeaDAS, and SeaDAS-ALT) is compared to the in situ measured reflectances. Water turbidities across the matchups in the Belgian Coastal Zone are about 20–100 FNU, and the overall performance is best for ACOLITE and L2-WFR, with the former providing lowest relative (Mean Absolute Relative Difference, MARD 7–27\%) and absolute errors (Mean Average Difference, MAD -0.002, Root Mean Squared Difference, RMSD 0.01–0.016) in the bands between 442 and 681 nm. L2-WFR provides the lowest errors at longer NIR wavelengths (754–885 nm). The algorithms that assume a water reflectance model, i.e. POLYMER and C2RCC, are at present not very suitable for processing imagery over the turbid Belgian coastal waters, with especially the latter introducing problems in the 665 and 709 nm bands, and hence the chlorophyll-a and turbidity retrievals. This may be caused by their internal model and/or training dataset not being well adapted to the waters encountered in the BCZ. The 1020 nm band is used most frequently by ACOLITE/DSF for the estimation of the atmospheric path reflectance (67\% of matchups), indicating its usefulness for turbid water atmospheric correction. Turbidity retrieval using a single band algorithm showed good performance for L2-WFR and ACOLITE compared to PANTHYR for e.g. the 709 nm band (MARD 15 and 17\%), where their reflectances were also very close to the in situ observations (MARD 11\%). For the retrieval of chlorophyll-a, all methods except C2RCC gave similar performance, due to the RedEdge band-ratio algorithm being robust to typical spectrally flat atmospheric correction errors. C2RCC does not retain the spectral relationship in the Red and RedEdge bands, and hence its chlorophyll-a concentration retrieval is not at all reliable in Belgian coastal waters. L2-WFR and ACOLITE show similar performance compared to in situ radiometry, but due to the assumption of spatially consistent aerosols, ACOLITE provides less noisy products. With the superior performance of ACOLITE in the 490–681 nm wavelength range, and smoother output products, it can be recommended for processing of S3/OLCI data in turbid waters similar to those encountered in the BCZ. The ACOLITE processor for OLCI and the in situ matchup dataset used here are made available under an open source license.
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Autumn bird migration registered by vertical radar at the Thornton bank in the Belgian part of the North Sea. In: Environmental impacts of offshore wind farms in the Belgian part of the North Sea, a continued move towards integration and quantification
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4 Decades of Belgian Marine MONitoring: Uplifting historical data to today’s needs - WP1 Coordination
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4 Decades of Belgian Marine MONitoring: Uplifting historical data to today’s needs - WP2 Data Management
- The data management team is now developing the central data portal, where all data stored in different databases (ie. at BMDC and VLIZ), will be made publicly accessible. This is a pilot for both data centers.
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4 Decades of Belgian Marine Monitoring: Uplifting historical data to today’s needs - WP5 Ocean Acidification
- There is a clear relation between pH and eutrophication, ocean acidification (increase CO2 in air), S-N atmospheric deposition and oligotrophication. The compiled datasets of pH show the seasonal dynamics of high pH in summer versus low pH in winter. Plotted time trends indicate a link to the stop of land-input of phosphates in the end of the ‘80s. An overall decrease in methane concentrations, salinity, temperature and wind speed is observed in the BCZ. It should be studied whether this is related to long-term climate changes.
