The La Plata basin, including the Parana, Paraguay and Uruguay river drainages, is the second most important in South America with more than 3,000,000 km², providing natural resources to a population of 165 million people, including five countries. Because of its size and international configuration, no initiative has yet intended to compile the distribution of the fish fauna. The objective of the Ictioplata database is to fill this gap, offering the most complete possible scientific base to study fish distribution patterns of the La Plata basin. The database is built on a Geographic Information System (GIS) including data from different sources:
A. Information extracted from the literature (published articles, books, gray literature).
B. Data available from museums/collections and universities.
C. Data extracted from online databases such as GBIF, FishNet, SpeciesLink and IABIN, among others.
The database already provides a comprehensive overview of the fish diversity and distribution in the "Rio de la Plata" drainage basin, with nearly 100.000 occurrence records from 12 data sources that all together regroup nearly 70 museum and university collections (see appendix), complemented with over 800 bibliographic references. These records range from 1829 to 2016 for over 1450 native and 24 exotic species.
At this stage (December 2019), the database is available upon request and will be available in early 2020 to download, along with futur updated versions, from the website www.freshwaterfishdata.earth.
freshwater fish, species distribution, Rio de la Plata
funding:
Financial support was offered by the Laboratoire Evolution et Diversité Biologique is part of the French Laboratory of Excellence projects "LABEX TULIP" and "LABEX CEBA" (ANR-10-LABX-41, ANR-10-LABX-25-01) and the Museo de Ciencias Naturales "Antonio Scasso" (Argentina)
The database is built on a Geographic Information System (GIS) including data from different sources:
A. Information extracted from the literature (published articles, books, gray literature).
B. Data available from museums/collections and universities.
C. Data extracted from online databases such as GBIF, FishNet, SpeciesLink and IABIN, among others.
FishBase & California Academy of Sciences-Catalogue of Fishes
reference(s):
Fricke, R., Eschmeyer, W. & Van der Laan, R. (2018). Catalog of Fishes: Genera, Species, References.
http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/catalog/fishcatmain.asp
Froese, R. & Pauly, D. (2018). FishBase. World Wide Web electronic publication. www.fishbase.org
sample specifications:
specification of method(s) used for sampling and sorting:
These are the fields contained in the database:
Field/Definition
ID ICTIO/Unique code of occurrence
Class/Name of the class
Order/Name of the order
Family/Name of the family
CDFB16 Unique code of the species in Fishbase
OGEN/Name of the genus
OESP/Name of the species
Species/Complete name of the species
TYPE/Type de species (holotype, etc...)
CAPDAY/Day of capture
CAPMONTH/Month of capture
CAPYEAR/Year of capture
COLLEC/Collecting person
IDENTI/Identification person
LTYPE/Type of length
LMM/Length in mm
PROV/Organism providing the information
BIBLIO/Bibliographic reference
REF/Origine of the data
COLMUS/Code of the museum
CDCOLLEC/Collection type code
NBCOLLEC/Collection number
IDGBIF/GBIF identification
TRANSLOC/Exotic status of the species
OLOCALITY/Locality information of the capture
ISO3/Code ISO3
FKST/Unique site code
OX_dd/Longitude
OY_dd/Latitude
OHYNAM/Name of the hydrologic system
IDGEON/Geonames code
OHYTYPE/Habitat type
HYINTER/Intermitency of the habitat
OBANAM/Name of the drainage basin
CD_BV1/Principal subdrainge code
OS_BV1/Principal subdrainge name
CD_BV2/Secundary subdrainge code
OS_BV2/Secundary subdrainge name
TYPDAT/ Data type (point or subdrainage)
scientific name/Species name in the original data source
DateUpdate/Date of last modification
Were any quality control procedures applied to your dataset?
yes
quality control protocols and comments:
To avoid any duplication when integrating data from different sources, all duplicates are identified and excluded during import by either verifying unique identifiers for occurrences (or fields that should constitute unique identifiers when considered together; e.g. institute + collection + collection number) or based on sampling details in combination with the geographical coordinates of the data.
Where available, details on provenance, citation, along with a modification/"last updated" timestamp (e.g. only available for GBIF and SpeciesLink) are systematically documented for the retained records. In addition, during import, each record is systematically checked for reliability and consistency, using the FishBase Consortium database, and the California Academy of Science's Catalog of Fishes, as nomenclature authority files. During the process of building the database, a taxonomic checklist work is achieved to validate all species actually present in the La Plata drainage basin.
