FishBase

It is the most consulted website of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (of which WorldFish is a part), with 14 million hits a month. It is an internationally-recognized Global Public Good: it is enjoyed by all, is global in its reach, helps to protect biodiversity, and it promotes food security. In short, the FishBase database is a one-stop shop for fisheries and fish biodiversity information.

WorldFish's FishBase is used extensively by fisheries managers and scientists to estimate important parameters like total mortality, annual reproductive rate and population resilience and growth of fish stocks. State-of-the-art analytical and graphical tools allow users to transform these raw data into detailed assessments of the state of fisheries and identify management techniques to restore depleted stocks to health.

Unsustainable fishing practices and stock depletion are hurting poor coastal communities in the developing countries that depend on fish resources. In the developing world, FishBase has been used by fisheries officials and researchers from Bangladesh to the Seychelles and Tanzania to India . Some 500 scientific publications have cited FishBase.

It is the most consulted website of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (of which WorldFish is a part), with 14 million hits a month. It is an internationally-recognized Global Public Good: it is enjoyed by all, is global in its reach, helps to protect biodiversity, and it promotes food security. In short, the FishBase database is a one-stop shop for fisheries and fish biodiversity information.

WorldFish's FishBase is used extensively by fisheries managers and scientists to estimate important parameters like total mortality, annual reproductive rate and population resilience and growth of fish stocks. State-of-the-art analytical and graphical tools allow users to transform these raw data into detailed assessments of the state of fisheries and identify management techniques to restore depleted stocks to health.

Unsustainable fishing practices and stock depletion are hurting poor coastal communities in the developing countries that depend on fish resources. In the developing world, FishBase has been used by fisheries officials and researchers from Bangladesh to the Seychelles and Tanzania to India . Some 500 scientific publications have cited FishBase.

Being a rich source of quality information, FishBase is also used for a host of other purposes. It has, for example, been used to verify scientific and common names (FishBase has perhaps the finest taxonomic database on the Internet, with helpful images) by publishers in the US , to translate English fish names into Dutch by hobbyists in Belgium , and by researchers to identify invasive goby species discovered in New Zealand waters.

This remarkable online database (www.fishbase.org) has information on nearly all of the fish species in the world -- over 28,600, or 96 per cent of the total known to us. The electronic encyclopedia provides essential information on everything from their biology, life history, ecology and disease to taxonomy, aquaculture and ecosystems. It also offers historical data reaching back 250 years, including the largest collection of fish museum and survey data on the Internet (over 1.9 million records).

In the 16 years since its launch in 1988, FishBase has gained recognition as a dynamic and authoritative resource for aquatic conservation and management. WorldFish has expanded and strengthened the resource over the years with support from the European Commission and other donors, and in cooperation with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and over 1,000 other collaborators.

This includes incorporating data to meet specific user needs of tropical developing countries, including China , India and the Philippines . These countries rely greatly on fishing and they have many small-scale fishers who usually work in family-run operations and who need access to inexpensive information .

FishBase has over 204,000 common names of fish species in 389 languages, 159,053 country records linked to about 300 ecosystems, and 1,053 fish identification keys. It is also linked to over 500 journals and has 34,100 bibliographic references. As the world's premier information system on fishes, FishBase also acts as host to the global databases of key collaborators such as the FAO, the California Academy of Sciences, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and the Natural Resources Institute of the UK .

Users can translate the main pages into nine different languages -- Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia and Chinese. The 16 non-Roman scripts include Cyrillic, Chinese, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Japanese, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Nepali and Bangla. WorldFish aims to make FishBase available in more languages and to more people in the developing world.