FishBase (www.fishbase.org) is the global premier Biodiversity Information System on all fishes of the world, covering more than 31,300 species.
FishBase is a one-stop website for fish-related natural resource management both for conservation and exploitation issues. As a Global Species Database, it records a wide range of information on all fish species currently known in the world about their biology, ecology, taxonomy, life history, trophic features, population dynamics and uses, as well as historical data reaching back 250 years, citing at least 43,300 references. More than 48,000 images are gathered for more than half of the species, with the help of many contributors. FishBase provides also a range of country, regional, and ecosystem-specific information. State of the art analytical and graphical tools allow users to transform raw data into information that can be used to assess fisheries and identify management techniques to restore depleted fish stocks. It is used extensively by fisheries managers and scientists in the developing world to estimate important biological parameters like mortality, annual reproductive rate, growth, and status of fish stocks.

FishBase works closely with the Catalog of Fishes of W.N. Eschmeyer to synchronize the taxonomy and the nomenclature with this fish taxonomic authority database. A major issue is to sustain the quick integration of the newly described species (still between 300 and 500 per year during the past ten years), and of the most recent taxonomic revisions. Importantly, and aside from the almost 82,000 scientific synonym names, a total of some 277,500 common names in 292 languages for over 26,000 species are available, including non-Roman scripts such as Arabic, Farsi, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, Nepali, Bangla and Hangeul.
FishBase is linked with many other global initiatives in Biodiversity Informatics either by extracting data such as from GBIF and OBIS for occurrences, or by providing information to Catalogue of Life, GenBank, FishBoL (Barcode of Life), Encyclopedia of Life, IUCN, among others.

As the world’s leading Biodiversity Information System on fishes, FishBase has collaborated with more than 100 countries, with scientists, museums and institutions, and also with amateur naturalists. Together with the WorldFish Center, its scientific integrity is ensured by 8 other institutions namely, ifM-Geomar (Kiel, Germany), University of British Columbia (UBC, Canada), Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris, France), Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tevruren, Belgium), Swedish Museum (Stockholm, Sweden), Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece), Chinese Academy of Fishery Science (Beijing, China), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Rome, Italy).
In 2004, the FishBase team, based at Los Baños, Philippines, won the prestigious CGIAR Science Award for Outstanding Scientific Support Team for their contribution in the creation and development of this information system, an award shared together with its wide variety of institutional partners and from almost 1,600 individual collaborators from all over the world.

Updated August 2009.