Celebrating the Fishbase Silver Jubilee and 10 years of SeaLifeBase
The 13th FishBase Symposium in Los Baños, Philippines, was a great success. The special event to mark the 25th anniversary of FishBase and the 10th anniversary of SeaLifeBase attracted international and national speakers around the challenge to use these web resources for teaching and research.
Dr Rainer Froese and Dr Daniel Pauly conceived FishBase more than 25 years ago (see their foto at the symposium to the right by CE Nauen). They are considered the fathers of FishBase.
Researchers, lecturers, fisheries officials, teachers and students flocked in for a full house audience. The talks provided an excellent panorama of how useful FishBase and SeaLifeBase have already become to countless researchers, teachers at all levels and many other users. For more details click here.
The winners of the FishBase contest for best drawing and underwater fotography open to young people from primary and secondary school levels and university students were honoured and received diplomas and prizes.
The day-long symposium was followed up with several other events and training courses for different collaborators and users in the Philippines.
Several school classes visited a poster exhibition that traced the many outreach activities of the FishBase Information and Research Group FIN. FIN has a major role in the continued development and maintenance of the two public webarchives. The winning entries to the FishBase youth contest were also displayed. See the video here.
FishBase and SealifeBase are sustained by a consortium of scientific institutions from around the world. They are currently
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Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research GEOMAR, Germany
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Swedish Natural History Museum, Sweden
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Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium
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Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, France
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University of British Columbia FC, Canada
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Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, FAO, Italy
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WorldFish, Malaysia
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Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece
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Chinese Academy of Fishery Science, China
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Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil