The FishBase, SeaLifeBase, Aquamaps, Q-Quatics team.
As part of the campaign that was launched in 2020 to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of FishBase and the 15th Anniversary of SeaLifeBase, we are joining forces with our partner projects and presenting the stories of the people behind the scenes who have been instrumental in ensuring the longevity of these two global biodiversity information systems.
Maintaining big data projects takes a lot. A lot of people to conduct research, populate databases, verify information, make the data accessible. It also requires a lot of material and financial resources.
Bonga shad (Ethmalosa fimbriat) taken from the waters of Guinea Bissau. Photo by Falia, Wikimedia Commons.
Twenty-six fish and invertebrate populations that live in the waters of eight West African countries are likely overfished or at risk of being overfished, a new Fisheries Centre Research Report reveals.
Preliminary results from the application of the CMSY and LBB stock assessment methods to fish populations in the EEZs of Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone, indicate that some stocks – such as that of cassava croaker off the coast of Liberia – are strongly overexploited.
Click on the image to be taken to the podcast episode or scroll down to the bottom of the article.
On the third episode of the FishBase and SeaLifeBase Anniversary Podcast, Deng Palomares talks about how SeaLifeBase came to be.
Octopus at a fish market in Indonesia. Photo by Deng Palomares.
Fish market favourites such as orange roughy, common octopus and pink conch are among the species of fish and invertebrates in rapid decline around the world, according to new research.
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Sea Around Us initiative at UBC, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the University of Western Australia assessed the biomass —the weight of a given population in the water— of more than 1,300 fish and invertebrate populations. They discovered global declines, some severe, of many popularly consumed species.