The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is responsible for all ecological monitoring in the Dutch part of the North Sea. The ministry applies an open data policy, according to which all monitoring data can be shared.
The main difficulty of Deltares, as data ambassador in the project, was that data are gathered by different parties. Therefore, some harmonisation (mostly done by the provider) was necessary to publish the best data possible. Conveniently, the ingestion portal guides the addition of relevant metadata, which is necessary for continued use of this kind of project-wise collected monitoring data.
Taxonomical names were matched to WoRMS by Deltares. The data providers published to EMODnet Biology the long term ecological monitoring data of the benthos collected in the period 1991-2015.
The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management has interest in the EMODnet data for analyses that require cross-border observations. Therefore, the ministry plan on continuing to use EMODnet data for future assessments.
