CSIRO Launching FishMap Online Mapping Tool

[Gad]

25 Feb 2013

FishMap launch

FishMap will be officially launched on Tuesday 26 February 2013 and is available on the Atlas of Living Australia website http://fish.ala.org.au/

FISHMAP is a free online mapping tool that allows anyone interested in fish to discover which fish species occur at any location or depth throughout the marine waters of Australia's continental shelf and slope.

FishMap was developed by CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship and the Atlas of Living Australia. It lets users create regional illustrated species lists for almost all of Australia's marine fish, detailed with photographs and illustrations, distribution maps and current scientific and common names.

"FishMap is the only resource of its kind in the world that covers virtually all species of marine fish found in the marine waters of an entire continent," says ichthyologist Mr Daniel Gledhill of CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship.

"Australia's marine biodiversity is among the richest in world, but until FishMap we lacked an Australia-wide capability to rapidly produce regional, illustrated species lists,"

"FishMap provides a fundamental tool to assist management and sustainability of our marine biodiversity and puts this major capability in the hands of managers, fishers, scientists and the broader public for the first time," he says.

"FishMap is the only resource of its kind in the world that covers virtually all species of marine fish found in the marine waters of an entire continent."

FishMap has a myriad of uses, from creating a personalised pictorial guide or identifying fish spotted during a dive, to plotting the range of a threatened species, to improving quality of data collected by citizen scientists, field workers and scientists, or determining the possible species composition for catches of any fishery in the waters of Australia's continental shelf and slope.

The tool provides the scientifically known geographical and depth ranges of over 4500 Australian marine fishes, including 320 sharks and rays, of which over 95 per cent have an associated image or illustration. Searches reveal illustrated lists of fishes by area, depth, family or ecosystem. Lists can be printed to create simple guides or data can be downloaded into a spreadsheet to create templates for data collection.