What to know about FishBase and how to use it.

FishBase was developed at the WorldFish Center (former ICLARM) by Rainer Froese and Daniel Pauly from 1987 onwards. It was financed by various grants of the European Commission between 1990 and 2000. Since 2001, FishBase is supported by a consortium that currently incorporates nine institutions: the WorldFish Center (Malaysia), FAO (Rome, Italy), the universities of Kiel (Germany), British Columbia (Canada) and Thessaloniki (Greece), the Chinese Academy of Fisheries Sciences (China), the Natural History Musea of Paris (France) and Stockholm (Sweden), and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium). Originally started as an information system on the economically most important fish species, FishBase has now become the largest online encyclopedia on fishes in the world, with information on more than 32.500 species. Within the FishBase Consortium, the RMCA is responsible for the data on African freshwater and brackish water fishes. FishBase contains data about all marine and freshwater fish species. This includes data on taxonomy, morphology, distribution, ecology, life history, population dynamics, aquaculture, physiology and diseases. It is currently available in 24 different languages, including English, French and Spanish. With nearly 300.000 common names, in more than 350 different languages, also non-scientists are able to find valuable information in FishBase. There are various tools based on the information present in FishBase, such as match names , which can be used to verify the validity of names, or Aquamaps, which has become an important tool to predict the natural occurrence of marine species based on various environmental parameters. The RMCA and FishBase are currently developing AquaMaps for African freshwater fishes. This includes, among others, the delineation of basins and subbasins in Africa, and the updating of species distributions.