Dealing with different names of geographic features or entities, VLIZ developed a standard, relational list of geographic names, coupled with information and maps of the geographic location of these features. The purpose of the gazetteer is to improve access and clarity of the different geographic, mainly marine names such as seas, sandbanks, ridges, bays or even standard sampling stations used in marine research. The geographic cover is global; however the gazetteer is focused on the Belgian Continental Shelf, the Scheldt Estuary and the Southern Bight of the North Sea. The Marine Regions Gazetteer is accessible both for humans and machines in different ways: - through the web portal by means of the search engine interface; - through REST APIs; - through SOAP calls; - through Linked Data Event Streams; - through an ad-hoc developed R Package: 'mregions'.

mregions provides access to the data from http://www.marineregions.org in R. It uses both the Marine Regions Gazetteer Web Services and the Marine Regions OGC Web Services. mregions can help in a variety of use cases: - visualize marine regions alone; - visualize marine regions with associated data paired with analysis; - use marine region geospatial boundaries to query data providers (e.g., OBIS: http://www.iobis.org); - Geocode: get geolocation data from place names; - reverse Geocode: get place names from geolocation data.

mregions2 provides access to the data from http://www.marineregions.org in R. It uses both the Marine Regions Gazetteer Web Services and the Marine Regions OGC Web Services in R. mregions2 superseedes the previous mregions R package.

The goal of sdmpredictors is to make environmental data, commonly used for species distribution modelling (SDM), also called ecological niche modelling (ENM) or habitat suitability modelling, easy to use in R. sdmpredictors gives access to several environmental datasets, including the the Bio-ORACLE Marine Data Layers for Bioclimatic Modelling. LifeWatch hosts the website https://www.bio-oracle.org/ and supports the development of these layers. The package contains methods for getting downloading raster data for the current climate but also for future and paleo climatic conditions. These rasters and then loaded into R.