ACP-EU Training

  Newsletter: ACP-EU Project News 98/02

ACP-EU Fisheries and Biodiversity Project

Dear Colleagues

With the Easter holiday season passed, Manila is back to business, and so are most of you. So let’s share the latest news: from you - and from us.

Best regards

The FishBase Team

W.N. Eschmeyer (California Academy of Science) spent 3 days with the FishBase team to finalize the CD-ROM version of his 3,000+ pages Catalog of Fishes, the ultimate reference on scientific names of fishes. The respective database was designed by Rainer Froese and Catalina Ranola, and will also be available in the next version of FishBase. Among other things, it will allow each country to produce a list of all fishes that have been originally described from their waters. This will of course include all endemic fishes.

Daniel Pauly arrived early this month in Manila and will work with the project here at HQ until July. He is looking forward to receive manuscripts from our trainees for editing.

The heat is on....the race for the 20,000 species for the FishBase 98 version is ongoing! At present, we have reached the 19,000 mark and needless to say, we are planning to reach the target. One of the features of the annual updates of FishBase is the increasing number of species in the database. There are at least 25,000 extant fish species globally, and we would like to fish them all (figuratively of course), by the year 2000!

The release of FishBase 98 was postponed to September 98, due to too many commitments and problems arising from the change to Access 97 and to a new installation software. It is planned to release an English and French version of FishBase 98 at a conference on 'Sustainable Use of Aquatic Biodiversity' at Expo 98 in Lisbon, 3-5 September 1998.

As a first true part of FishBase searchable through the Internet, the FishBase Glossary (English and French) has been installed on an Internet server at Manila HQ (http://www.fishbase.org/). Search speed is acceptable, as we have been told by collaborators in Europe. We will now gradually make more and more parts of FishBase available on the Internet. We are still waiting for a software that would translate our several hundred existing Access 97 forms and reports into active HTML pages and thus save us the tedious and time-consuming process of doing it manually.

Rainer Froese participated in a conference 'Towards Policies for Conservation and Sustainable Use of Aquatic Genetic Resources' at the beautiful and prestigious Bellagio Study and Conference Center in northern Italy, run by the Ford Foundation. Rainer presented a paper entitled: 'Threatened Fishes: Analysis of the Fishes in the 1996 IUCN Red List' (co-authors Armi Torres and Brian Groombridge). The paper drew on the information that FishBase holds on the threatened fishes. Major findings: Freshwater fishes are ten times more threatened than marine fishes; there is a correlation between human population density and number of threatened fishes; there is also a correlation between number of introduced fishes and number of threatened fishes. Rainer's PowerPoint presentation is available through the FishBase home page.

Translation progress: Nicolas Bailly of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has agreed to work with Deng Palomares on the translation of the FishBase 98 book into French. The translation work entails the use of two software products, a machine translation software and Translator’s Workbench, purchased for this particular purpose. Nicolas and Deng will start work on the translations in early May with a goal to have the published version available with the release of FishBase 98 later this year.

News from Colleagues

Pacific Node

Temakai Tebano wrote a long letter (sent by fax, because his e-mail connection through the University of the South Pacific is down!). He is in touch with Kintoba Tearo from Kiribati Fisheries Department, and together they are working on their publication on reef fish of Tarawa, the capital island of Kiribati. Temakai Tebao is also working on data for biological parameters such as length/weight measurements, gonad stage, and sex ratio for a number of species. Once written up, this will be another good example of making better use of existing data.

Petelo Ioane has impressed his staff at the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme with a presentation of FishBase. He expects to have his paper ready by the end of April.

Similarly, Philip Polon (National Fishing Authorities, PNG) hopes to send his paper on Spanish Mackerel by May. He reports that more and more researchers in his department are getting interested in FishBase and are using it for their work. He also intends to give a FishBase presentation to a local mining company (good idea!), who apparently engages in the stocking of water bodies with freshwater species. Unfortunately, he also has his normal e-mail connection down, because of lack of funds in his department to replace old lines.

Tim Adams has confirmed that applications for the position of Reef Fisheries Management Adviser at SPC are presently being reviewed and that the person selected will most probably start working early June 98. This person will also serve as the project’s training coordinator for the Pacific region.

Caribbean Node

Preparations for the training course in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad are in full swing with definite dates now scheduled for May 21 to June 3. The regional partner to the project, the Caribbean Fisheries Resource Assessment and Management Program (CFRAMP), has already identified and recruited the assistant regional training coordinator, Ms. Nerissa Nagassar. Ms. Nagassar previously worked with the "Fisheries Management Information System (fismis)" project in Port of Spain. Thus, she is well acquainted with the problems and merits of compiling information and making it available through modern database systems. A hearty welcome to her, and we all wish her success in her new position.

Review of applications from suitable candidates for the position of training coordinator is still ongoing. Dates for a training course to be held in Namibia are being discussed. As it looks now, the most likely date will be early December 98, due to constraints in the availability of our trainers.

Information section

As usual, we have been monitoring the constant flow of information coming in through the Internet for things that might be more specifically of interest to the readers of this Circular.

For those interested in, but not attending the fourth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Bratislava, 4-15 May), most of the documents are now available (either as advance drafts or in their final form) on the CBD's web site http://www.biodiv.org/cop4/cop4docs.html.

Though not directly related to the aquatic environment, the following might provide good insights into aspects of environmental protection: Land, Livestock and Environment Global Network: This network provides an opportunity to look at all aspects of land utilization. Its web site address is: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/3770/aslam.htm. In an era, when management goals of rangelands and grasslands of the earth have become more complex, landscape values, resource conservation, biodiversity, recreation, ecotourism and wildlife management are challenging the traditional use of land.

By the way, if you come across an interesting address on the Internet (or would like us to check its information content for you), just provide us with the full Internet address.

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