Essential facts of the monitoring of the sand extraction and its impact on the Flemish banks on the Belgian Continental Shelf from 2003 to 2012

The monitoring of sand extraction on the Flemish sandbanks of the Belgian continental shelf is based on multiple types of data: statistics derived from the extraction registers, data from the Electronic Monitoring System (EMS = “black-boxes”) on board the dredging vessels (complete records are available since 2003), and regular bathymetric surveys with the multibeam echosounders MBES) EM1002 and EM3002D (installed on the R/V Belgica) across the sandbanks along parallel lines and on specific areas. The analysis of the various types of data provides a 4D (space and time) view of the evolution of... Mehr ...