Taxonomic and Distributional Databases of Fishes in Taiwan

Abstract

The fishes of Taiwan comprise total 2450 species in 250 families, about 1/10 of the world's fishes. Curatorial and distributional data of Taiwanese fish have been integrated into a database that can be accessed interactively on the Internet at http://fishdb.sinica.edu.tw. The database includes the following items: basic information and specimen photo of each species, distributional database, bibliographic database, curatorial database, inquiring system for Chinese fish names of the world fishes, and new version of erratum of ‘Fishes of Taiwan’. The above regional database of Taiwanese fishes provides hyperlinks to fish data for each species in the global fish data, FishBase, of ICLARM (http://www.fishbase.org). Through the collaboration with FishBase and other global networks for taxonomic purposes, like Species 2000, BioNet, or GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facilities), users in the world can also obtain updated data provided by Taiwan. We hope our experience with database establishment can be used as a model to help other countries to develop their own regional fish databases or even to build up databases of other groups of organisms. There should be one good approach for all people in the world for sharing complete and updated biodiversity information via the Internet.