BRUVS data now available on FishBase.org
Marine Futures Lab| 08 April 2021
Cover image
Photo credit: M. Theiss, Nat Geo image collection
NEWS
We are pleased to announce that our imagery data from baited remote underwater video systems (BRUVS) are now available on FishBase!
The world’s online encyclopedia on fish makes available to users the download of BRUVS data at www.fishbase.org. The data can be searched by species, family or country/island. Across all BRUVS samples, you can search for the records of any species of interest, how many, how large and where they were found. Time-series data are also available on diversity, abundance, size and biomass for certain locations.
BRUVS provides data on fish assemblages to better understand an array of axes such as the influence of environmental drivers and the impact of human pressure on the marine environment. The geolocation of each datum point and time-series available allow the use of this data as a benchmark for future trends as new surveys are logged on FishBase.
The scientific and tech teams from Quantitative Aquatics, FishBase and the University of Western Australia, with support from the Minderoo Foundation, worked together to provide the database with a targeted access mechanism to 1000 TB of video comprised of 150,000 records of more than 250 species from over 30 locations globally. This information is stored on UWA’s Institutional Research Data Store and other open-access video repositories.
“The Marine Futures Lab has pioneered the extension of video-based sampling to the open ocean and we are delighted to see all of our data now publicly available through FishBase, a trusted platform for information on fishes,” said Jessica Meeuwig, member of the steering committee overseeing this project and director of the Marine Futures Lab at the University of Western Australia. “We look forward to transferring all of our data from our seabed BRUVS, curated over the last 15 years and encourage our colleagues to make their data similarly available to the global research community.”
In addition to the BRUVS data themselves, users can also access metadata related to the exact time and coordinates where the images were recorded.
For Deng Palomares, chair of the BRUSnFB project steering committee and member of the FishBase board of trustees, bringing this project to life has meant breaking with a status quo in which most BRUVS data languish on the computer hard disks of individual researchers or on poorly known online platforms whose data are accessible only with permission.
“Scientific progress flourishes through data sharing and as such, there is a need to expand unrestricted access to BRUVS data by making it accessible to the 500,000 unique users who visit FishBase each month,” Palomares said.
