Sandy shores or beaches line 70 % of the world’s oceans, including the entire Belgian coastline (67 km). They have a multitude of ecosystem functions, constitute an important habitat for a variety of fauna and flora and hold important economic, social and cultural value as prime recreational assets. In order to protect the Belgian coastline against erosion and coastal flooding on a short and long term basis (up to 2050), the Belgian sandy beaches face a multitude of beach nourishment activities over the next years, as stipulated in the Belgian Master Plan for Coastal Safety. Monitoring the ecological characteristics of the Belgian beaches will aid in the detection of possible impact effects of past, current and future beach nourishment activities.To this end, 686 intertidal and 582 shallow subtidal samples from the period 1997 – 2011 were analysed to describe the macrobenthic communities and corresponding abiotic patterns on 16 Belgian beaches. The 15 intertidal and 9 shallow subtidal locations were treated separately. The partitioning of macrobenthic community structure within the Belgian beach ecosystem showed a large within beach variability, linked to elevation on the beach (intertidal: 44 % and shallow subtidal: 50 %) and median grain size of the sediment (intertidal: 35 % and shallow subtidal: 23 %), in both the intertidal and shallow subtidal zone. Large scale along-shore spatial (intertidal: 14 % and shallow subtidal: 13 %) and long-term temporal (intertidal: 5% and shallow subtidal: 12 %) variability clearly explained less variation. Several spatial and temporal trends in abiotic factors (overall median grain size between 150 and 300 µm) and in macrobenthic species richness (intertidal: 0 – 19 species; shallow subtidal: 0 – 28 species), abundance (intertidal: 0 – 3988.75 individuals.m-²; shallow subtidal: 0 – 1949.32 individuals.m-²) and biomass (intertidal: 0 – 6.95 g AFDW.m-²; shallow subtidal: 0 – 246.14 g AFDW.m-²) were measured. The mean macrobenthic abundance in the intertidal and shallow subtidal ...