On the 15th of August 2019, Ms. Emily Capuli, Thematic Group Leader for Taxonomy in Q-quatics, gave a seminar-presentation on “Integrating and Splitting of Species in FishBase: species/distribution updates affecting Qq projects” at the Qq office in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines.
Emily began her presentation by citing different sources used for changes in the validity of names and species status in relation to distribution (e.g. revisions, reviews, the Catalog of Fishes website). Related tables and fields were presented and examples were shown to illustrate their importance to the work and projects of Q-quatics; i.e., the Synonyms (other names used), Stocks (summary of species distribution), Biblio (name used in a reference and its distribution) and Country (status of occurrence) tables. After showing samples of actual records in FishBase, some helpful hints or steps in finding the correct species were given by: 1) taking note of the taxonomic remark in the Species table; 2) using Species Encoder Seek for searching ambiguous and misapplied names (click Synonyms); 3) looking at the FB Reference stat and nomenclatural changes of references used and; 4) reviewing the stocks definition and country records for range of distribution. Then, she enumerated the significance of splitting and integrating of species affecting projects such as AquaMaps (species range), Video (identification), Minderoo projects (data linked to correct species), faunal listings (presence/absence), and other routine encoding tasks.
