Page History

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Our database includes records from over 40 specimen-holding institutions and more recently state and federal agency datasets, records extracted from the literature, citizen science data, angler-sourced data and other sources collected as far back as the mid 1800's. Our efforts have focused on standardizing, merging and subjecting the data to a rigorous error detection and correction process and making it available to researchers, natural research managers and the publicvia the website and GBIF. The resulting fish occurrence records now include the state's approximately 280 species found in freshwaters and many more from its bays and off-shore. This database is available online and allows for powerful data queries, on-the-fly mapping of results, and downloading of records to facilitate its utilization in diverse and complex education, research, and management applications, as well as education.

While preserving and always displaying the donor institutions' verbatim data as we received it, we synonymized the thousands of scientific names received from contributing institutions to current taxonomic standards and added standardized common names. This, together with the project's extensive normalization and editing of all fields (dates, localities, place names, collector's names, etc.), georeferencing (applying latitude/longitude) with estimates of error, and addition of many categorical geographic fields (e.g., counties, drainage basins, Hydrologic Unit Codes, Native Fish Conservation Areas, etc.), as well as thorough documentation of the complete data processing methodology, result in a very high quality data resource.

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