Sea Around Us is a research initiative at The University of British Columbia (located at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, formerly Fisheries Centre) that assesses the impact of fisheries on the marine ecosystems of the world, and offers mitigating solutions to a range of stakeholders. The Sea Around Us emphasizes catch time series starting in 1950, and related series (e.g., landed value and catch by flag state, fishing sector and catch type), and fisheries-related information on every maritime country (e.g., government subsidies, marine biodiversity) presented for countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones, Large Marine Ecosystems, the High Seas and other spatial scales, and as global maps and summaries.
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 grown to having a wide range of information on all species currently known in the world: taxonomy, biology, trophic ecology, life history, and uses, as well as historical data reaching back to 250 years.
SeaLifeBase is a joint project of the Sea Around Us (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) and The FishBase Information and Research Group, Inc. (FIN, Los Baños, Philippines), and is endorsed and monitored by the FishBase Consortium. Initiated in October 2005 in response to the need to cover organisms other than fishes, SeaLifeBase went online in late 2008. It was built using the highly successful FishBase model, drawing on the over 20 years of FishBase experience.
AquaMaps is a species distribution modelling project that generates predictive maps of the natural range of aquatic species based on species’ environmental tolerances. It uses information in FishBase, SeaLifeBase in conjunction with other biodiversity databases. Marine AquaMaps went online in 2006, and at present, has maps of current and future distribution for over 25,000 species. Freshwater AquaMaps for the Americas followed in 2007 and has since expanded to cover Africa, Europe and China.
The Catalogue of Life is the most comprehensive and authoritative global index of all known species currently available. It consists of a single integrated species checklist and taxonomic hierarchy. The present Catalogue is compiled from peer-reviewed checklists provided by 156 taxonomic databases including FishBase. It was first published online and on CD-ROM in 2000, and at present, holds essential information on the names, relationships and distributions of over 1.6 million species.