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.
Keywords
species distribution, Parana river, Paraguay river, Uruguay river
How to cite this article
Jézéquel, C., Bigorne, R., Liotta, J., Oberdorff, T. & Tedesco, P.A., 2020. Metadata description of the Ictioplata database: a fish distribution database for the La Plata drainage basin. Freshwater Metadata Journal 46: 1-6. https://doi.org/10.15504/fmj.2020.46
We are a very young journal and would appreciate any feedback. If you should have questions, suggestions, recommendations for improvements please do not hesitate to contact us at editor@freshwaterbiodiversity.eu
