![]() ![]() The BMB is a reference list of publications on the Flemish coast and the Belgian Part of the North Sea as well as other marine, estuarine and coastal publications written by Belgian authors and scientists or foreign scientists affiliated with Belgian institutes. The Belgian Marine Bibliography or BMB ( ) was searched to set up a Kenyan literature collection. The first step was to identify potential literature for digitization. The Kenya-Belgium data collection is online available through the LifeWatch portal ( ) and can be assessed through the Integrated Marine Information System (IMIS) hosted at VLIZ. Overall, this data rescue project focused on the digitization and online disclosure of distribution records of observed taxa in both time and space to make these data accessible again for the scientific community. Thanks to this project potentially high interesting data were digitized, standardized, quality controlled and brought together in one comprehensive dataset. In that way, such data are nowadays hard to find for researchers: a lot of time may be lost when figuring out either where to find the data in literature or what type of data exist in a particular scientific work. In the past, the data collected during the KBP were mostly scattered and even hidden in the publications and reports coming out of the project. One of the activities within this MoU is the recovery of data resulting from marine research in Kenya. This MoU aims to promote further partnership in the field of marine sciences between Belgium and Kenya (in a coordinated way). ![]() In 2012, the long lasting collaboration as described above resulted in a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) and the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI). During this period, the number of scientific publications, especially in international journals, increased considerably (Table 1). Between 19, a total of 13 KMFRI researchers completed the FAME course at the VUB. Most important realizations in this phase were the development of African’s largest oyster farm in Gazi Bay and the reforestation of more than 10 hectares of mangrove forests (90,000 trees of 5 different mangrove species). As a logical extension, a third phase of the KBP started with a project on Research towards sustainable exploitation of natural resources in mangrove forests (1992–1996) with the continuation of the research on fish, crustaceans, birds, algal and phytoplankton cultivation and pollution monitoring. The successful cooperation between Kenya and Belgium and the coordinating role of the KBP proved to be a major attraction to other countries in East-Africa and Europe and resulted in several major international projects. The main objective was to conduct fundamental research in the areas of plankton, reef ecology, water chemistry, coastal oceanography and modelling, fisheries, algae, pollution and library sources. The initial phase was extended for another four years (1989–1992) in a new project called Higher institute for marine sciences. The first fundamental research efforts were logically directed at the inventory and description of fauna and flora at the Kenyan Coast (Gazi Bay). The first phase of the KBP, named Cooperation in the field of marine ecology and management of the coastal zone (1985–1988) included an update of the necessary sampling equipment (basic lab, cars, boats and computers) and the start of a postgraduate course Fundamental and Applied Marine Ecology (FAME) at VUB for scientists of developing countries. The project consisted of three successive phases. The aim was to improve the collaboration between different scientific institutes and marine scientists in Belgium and Kenya. The Kenya-Belgium cooperation in marine sciences (KBP) project was launched in 1985 1 as an initial collaboration between the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI) under the supervision of the late Prof. Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format) ![]()
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