If you want to know which freshwater related datasets are available in a specific region or if you are looking for a dataset that might support your own research, you can consult the Freshwater Metadatabase to find appropriate datasets and get information about their usage requirements.
The Freshwater Metadatabase query tool offers the possibility to select the ecosystem type, the region, the organism group or the timeframe first. If you click “apply query options” after you have made your choice, you will get a table with appropriate results. The Freshwater Metadatabase full text search can be queried for any term you are interested in and also leads to the result table. The result table not only lists the available datasets, but also shows the scientific contact persons and offers details to each dataset by clicking on “open view”. Data can be downloaded as pdf- or eml-file.
Searching is currently oriented towards species-searching. Please note that the number of species present in our databases is far from complete. See here for more information on the currently available dataset(s).
Currently we have data available for the following organism groups: Halacaridae, Hydroida, Cladocera, Copepoda, Mysidacea, Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera, Macrophytes, Bivalvia, Nematomorpha, Turbellaria, Rotifera, Fish and Mammals covering over 47'000 species.
You can either search for species information or occurrences. The simple search for both these searches allow you to check species or occurrence details for a specific species or consult information on a random species. The advanced taxon search allows you to search for (species names in) a specific (FADA) species group or any part of the scientific name (genus, specific epithet, author, year). The advanced occurrence search allows you to search for a specific species or species group in combination with the geographic options for continent, country or faunistic (FADA) region.
In order to help you to find a specific species, we implemented an autocomplete option which starts suggesting species names (or parts of the name for the advanced species search) once you have typed 3 or more letters. If you don’t have a specific species in mind and just want to test a few searches, we suggest you start typing one of the genera of freshwater macrofauna listed in next paragraph. If you are only interested to view the georeferenced records, you can tick the checkbox. The same applies for suspect coordinates, zoo/aquarium/farm occurrences and fossil records.
The advanced species search option allows you to select a species group of interest, look for all species within a genus, all species with a certain specific epitheth/specific name, look for species described in a certain year etc.
Genera containing macrofauna species: Acipenser, Alligator, Arapaima, Argyrosomus, Arius, Atractosteus, Brachyplatystoma, Caiman, Carcharhinus, Catlocarpio, Chrysichthys, Clarias, Crocodylus, Ctenopharyngodon, Eleutheronema, Eunectes, Gavialis, Hemibagrus, Heterobranchus, Hexaprotodon, Himantura, Hippopotamus, Hucho, Huso, Hydrochoerus , Hydrocynus, Hypophthalmichthys, Hypselobarbus, Ictalurus, Inia, Labeo, Lates, Lipotes, Luciobarbus, Maccullochella, Mecistops, Megalops, Melanosuchus, Morone, Neophocaena, Oncorhynchus, Orcacella, Osteolaemus, Paleosuchus, Pangasianodon, Pangasius, Paulicea, Phoca, Platanista, Polydactylus, Polyodon, Potamotrygon, Pristis, Probarbus, Psephurus, Pseudoplatystoma, Pusa, Pylodictis, Salmo, Scaphirhynchus, Scomberomorus, Silurus, Sotalia, Tomistoma, Tor, Trichechus, Wallago.
If you only typed a genus or an incomplete name, you may be presented with a disambiguation list showing all species that match your query string. This list can be downloaded for off-line processing. If you click on a species, or selected a species from the autocomplete list, you should be forwarded to the results page. Depending on whether you chose species or occurrence searching, you will first be presented with either species details or with an overview of the occurrence data. You can easily switch between species and occurrence results using the tab on top of the page. In "occurrence" mode, you can click on species in the table to get more details for a specific record. On the occurrence map, you can switch on/off different layers by clicking the "+" sign to the right of the frame. Currently we only offer occurrence data downloads for individual species results. Creating download options for more advanced queries is one of the next tasks on our to-do list!
