William N. Eschmeyer and his Catalog of Fishes. Images by the California Academy of Sciences.
By Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese and Nicolas Bailly.
The Quantitative Aquatics and Sea Around Us teams lament the passing of W.N ‘Bill’ Eschmeyer (1939-2024), the founding editor and namesake of the Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes (ECoF).
Prominent researchers in the fields of biology and fisheries science are set to gather on September 6-7, 2021, in Paris to celebrate the 30th anniversary of FishBase and the 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase.
Hosted at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, on the banks of the river Seine, the FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium will bring together renowned scientists such as Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese, Jessica Meeuwig, Jos Snoeks, among others, who will present the different uses of FishBase and SeaLifeBase in the fields of ecology, biogeography, fisheries, taxonomy and aquariology.
Click on the image to be taken to the podcast episode or scroll down to the bottom of the article.
On the fifth episode of the FishBase and SeaLifeBase Anniversary Podcast, Nicolas Bailly tells the story of how he helped create SeaLifeBase by taking an empty shell of the FishBase database structure and populating it with information from the Catalogue of Life.
FishBase was born 30 years ago and SeaLifeBase 15 years ago.
The processes and efforts behind the creation of these two databases have been complex and enormous, involving dozens of staff members and thousands of collaborators.
The year 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of FishBase and the 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase, two online global biodiversity information systems that, together, provide biological and ecological information on more than 110,000 marine species.