Fishspotting: freshwater fish species presence in European river basins – RivFISH database

Biodiversity assessments at the river basin level represent a crucial step in drawing conservation strategies for freshwater biota. As river basins are independent functional units, it is fundamental to ensure that spatial information on species presence is fitted to the basins where they effectively occur. To maximize quality and fitness for data usage, scientific names recorded during fish sampling, which may be outdated (synonyms), need to be associated with currently accepted species names. The RivFISH database shows the presence of all native freshwater-dependent fish species in 1554 European river basins, linking data from both synonyms and accepted scientific species names. Spatial data was compiled from a total of 68 references and confronted with the accepted names lists from FishBase, thus ensuring the correspondence of the recorded species name with its current accepted names and river basin presence. RivFISH is composed of six normalized tables reflecting the association between species taxonomy, presence in each river basin, and IUCN risk category, and one denormalized table including all fields for user convenience. Overall, RivFISH includes a total of 707 scientific species names, 667 of which are currently accepted, and aims to facilitate large-scale studies in Europe and promote the interoperability with conservation-related datasets.