Global distribution of records in the FishNet2 database with yellow circles indicating the locations of participating institutions

FishNet2 is the latest incarnation of a collaborative project initiated by the University of Kansas, United States in the late 1990s and currently administrated by Tulane University.

The project website provides an open access, searchable database containing data stored in icthyological collections of natural history museums, universities and other institutions around the world, with an open invitation for any such organisation with a fish collection to join.

It’s primarily aimed at researchers in academia and state/federal resource managers but anyone is able to access the information which currently comprises data compiled from over 50 participating institutions including over 30 million specimens.

Searches can be performed using full text, common names, synonyms, institutions, temporal or geographic information and there’s also a mapping function using which search results are downloaded as a KML file which can then be visualised in Google Earth or by drawing a polygon on a map and querying all records within that polygon.

The Fishnet search interface is easy to use

Individual institutions are reponsible for supplying and updating information regarding their collections and can do so by connecting data to the internet via a technology called IPT, an older technology called DiGIR or by submitting a spreadsheet.

Future plans for the project include development of alternative methods for data harvesting,  improved search performance, improving data quality and online mapping.

We had a play with the various features and the mapping in particular may prove useful for aquarists wishing to search for species occurring within a given area or country, for example, while the benfits of the system for scientists are obvious.

The project is currently supported by the National Science Foundation and National Biological Information Infrastructure while its structure has been used to develop similar search portals for reptiles and amphibians within HerpNET and birds within ORNIS.

Check out the FishNet2 website here and their Facebook page here.