FishBase Lessons Learned

1
FishBaseLessons Learned
Rainer Froese Germany rfroese_at_ifm-geomar.de
2
The Vision

• Back in 1987, two scientists had an idea
• Create a database with key-information on 200
  commercial fish species
• Use it for research
• Make it available to 500 fisheries managers in
  developing countries
• 20 years later
• www.fishbase.org contains information on 29,800
  species which it contributes to the Catalogue of
  Life
• Has over 1,000 citations in the scientific
  literature
• Has about 2 million visitors per month in the
  Internet

3
If these hits were stocks
4
It Looks Like This
5
And This
6
Where is the Science?
7
Who is Using it?
8
Where?
9
What?
10
About 10,000 visitors per month
11
Where is the Science?85 ISI Citations, 3 in
Nature, 2 in Science (June 2002)
IT
June 2002
12
Google Scholar, April 2006 1610 citations,
including 5 in Nature and 7 in Science
13
Link-Analysis
14
(Science 1998)
15
19/32
16
Fish Rulers
17
Under The Hood
Lessons Evolve or Go Extinct

• From DataEase to MS Access to MySQL to ???
• From HTML to Cold Fusion to PHP to ???
• 6 mirrors around the world, not enough
• www.ZoneEdit.com for load-balancing, maybe not
  sufficient

18
General Principles
Lessons Spirit

• Keep it simple
• Yes-Attitude
• Be opportunistic
• Give more credit than was expected
• Deal with errors
• Expose data
• Invite, accept and act on criticism
• Compare data
• Use your data

19
Lessons Business Model

• Champion Rainer Froese
• Key supporters Daniel Pauly Cornelia Nauen
• Institutions
• ICLARM
• Since 2000 FishBase Consortium
• Donors
• European Commission
• Sloan, Germany
• Pew, USGS, NRDC, Taiwan, Australia,

20
(No Transcript)
21
Lessons Operating Mode

• Strong leadership by one person
• Lose oversight by Consortium
• Full-time data entry by team of specialists
  full-time programmers
• Large network of additional contributors (mostly
  photos corrections)

22
Future Plans
Future Plans

• Complete coverage and content
• Improve mapping
• Add more analytical tools
• Move to mobile devices
• Do FishBase for all aquatic species
• Do FishBase for all species

23
Greetings from the FishBase Team
24
Thanks to our Partners and Sponsors