SeaLifeBase

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. With a few changes, the adaptation of SeaLifeBase data was efficient, employing less programming and development time. It uses the taxonomic structure of the Catalogue of Life, which is itself enhanced by expert-reviewed taxonomic data of the World Register of Marine Species. These two global catalogues are the source of 56% of the nearly 129,934 scientific names of metazoan species in SeaLifeBase, including information necessary for the management of commercially important non-fish metazoans . Data on, for example, algae enhanced by taxonomic data from AlgaeBase, increased SeaLifeBase's nominal species to over 105,000 (50% of which contain data on distribution, ecology and species specific life histories). In 2010, SeaLifeBase started completing species assignments by ecosystem, with an obvious interest, i.e., the South China Sea, the large marine ecosystem that contains the Coral Triangle, a marine biodiversity hotspot. This was followed by a string of commissioned work that will provide information on the marine biodiversity of, e.g., Belize (for an advocacy campaign against drilling in their barrier reef), islands being considered as large marine protected areas, notably those by the Global Oceans Legacy (Pew Charitable Trusts), including the Kermadec, Pitcairn and Easter Islands, and some large marine ecosystems of special interest, including the Mediterrranean Sea and the Antarctic Ocean. In 2012, the database contained 24,100 common names for 22,128 species and key data extracted from 12,500 references contributed by 120 ...Read More