Aims and scope The European Alien Species Information Network team (EASIN, http://easin.jrc.ec.europa.eu) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) requested the European member states on 22 June 2016 at the 6th IAS Committee to verify the baseline distribution data (2017) of invasive alien species of Union Concern (37 species) as provided by the EASIN mapping system (Katsanevakis et al. 2012). These are species with documented biodiversity impacts sensu the European Union Regulation on the prevention and management of the introduction and spread of Invasive Alien Species in Europe (IAS Regulation No 1143/2014) (European Union 2014). The purpose of this baseline was to set a representative geographic account of the current distribution of these species at (i) country and (ii) 10km2 grid level and to get feedback from the member states on this. This distribution provides the baseline for subsequent reporting by the member states as required by the IAS Regulation. The dataset provides a shapefile on the baseline distribution of the invasive species of EU concern in Belgium based on an aggregated dataset (ias_belgium_t0_2016). Data were compiled from various datasets holding invasive species observations such as data from research institutes and research projects (76%), citizen science observatories (23%) and a range of other sources (1%) such as governmental agencies, water managers, invasive species control companies, angling and hunting organizations etc. Data were normalized using a custom mapping of the original data files to Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) where possible. Species names were mapped to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (GBIF 2016) using the species API (http://www.gbif.org/developer/species). Appropriate selection of records for ias_belgium_t0_2016 was performed based on predefined cut-off dates and record content validation (see further). Data were then joined with GRID10k layer Belgium based on GRID10k cellcodes (ETRS_1989_LAEA). File description The dataset (ias_belgium_t0_2016.zip) contains two types ...