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FishBase is the world’s premier information system on the world’s fishes, with detailed information on almost all of the known world fish species. Recently the 30,000th species was added to the database; it now includes more than 96% of all known species).
The FishBase database is a one-stop site for fisheries and fish biodiversity information. FishBase is used extensively by fisheries managers and scientists in the developing world to estimate important biological parameters like mortality, annual reproductive rate, and growth of fish stocks. FishBase provides a range of country, regional, and ecosystem-specific information. State of the art analytical and graphical tools allow users to transform these raw data into information that has been used to assess fisheries and identify management techniques to restore depleted fish stocks.
FishBase has information on almost all of the fish species currently known in the world. A total of some 207,000 common names in some 400 languages for 30,000 species and almost 36,000 references are included. FishBase provides information on biology, life history, taxonomy, aquaculture, ecology and disease as well as offers historical data reaching back 250 years, including the largest collection of fish museum and geo-referenced survey data on the Internet (some 1.91 million records). Non-roman scripts such as Cyrillic, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Japanese, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Nepali, and Bangla have been added to FishBase.
The WorldFish Center won the prestigious CGIAR Science Award for Outstanding Scientific Support Team in 2004 for its work with a wide variety of partners in creating and improving FishBase.
As the world’s leading information system on fish, FishBase also acted as host to the global databases of members from more than 100 countries and more than 1,200 collaborators such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the California Academy of Sciences, the International Council for Exploration of the Sea, and the Natural Resources Institute of the United Kingdom. The WorldFish Center’s involvement in FishBase is primarily funded by the European Community.
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