Breaking News! Together, FishNet2 and FishBase comprise the new Global Thematic Fish OBIS Node! The new partnership delegates the provision of specimen-vouchered occurrences and data derived from specimens to FishNet2, while FishBase is tasked to provide occurrence data gathered from trawling surveys, ecological monitoring, field data sampling and more.
FishBase (www.fishbase.org) is now hosted by Quantitative Aquatics, Inc. (Q-quatics), which is a non-stock, non-profit NGO established in the Philippines to support the assembly and dissemination of key data on living aquatic resources for the development of research tools. Other global information systems supported by Q-quatics are SeaLifeBase, the global fisheries initiative Sea Around Us, the Catalogue of Life, and the global aquatic biogeography initiative, AquaMaps. Q-quatics also supports the cutting-edge databases and research developed by the Sea Around Us.
FishBase is a global biodiversity information system on finfishes. Its initial goal to provide key facts on population dynamics for 200 major commercial species has now increased to a wide range of information on all species currently known in the world: taxonomy, biology, trophic ecology, life history, and human uses, as well as historical data reaching back to 250 years. At present, FishBase covers >33,000 fish species compiled from >52,000 references in partnership with >2,000 collaborators: >300,000 common names and >55,000 pictures. Our website gathers more than 700,000 visits monthly.
FishNet2 (www.fishnet2.net) is hosted by the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI), a research center of the School of Science and Engineering of the Tulane University (USA). FishNet2 provides access to data records for over 40 million preserved fish specimens globally.
The FishNet network is a collaborative effort among fish collections around the world to share and distribute data on specimen holdings. There is an open invitation for any institution with a fish collection to join this network. FishNet2 was created in 1999 and initially relied upon a distributed query model based on the Z39.50 search/retrieval protocol. Over the years, FishNet has transitioned through a number of technological improvements. The modern search portal relies upon a core web service known as the Biological Object Search Service (BOSS) which is comprised of a series of software and database components that harvests data from providers, imports harvested data into a data cache and exposes the data cache via publicly accessible web-based APIs. The architecture for FishNet 2 has been mirrored to provide similar search portals for reptile and amphibian data within HerpNET and bird data within ORNIS.
Both Q-quatics and TUBRI are members of the IODE network of Associate Data Units (ADUs).
