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license: cc-by-nc-4.0
---

# Dataset Card for FishBase

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Snapshots of FishBase data tables used by the [rOpenSci package `rfishbase`](https://github.com/ropensci/rfishbase) and the FishBase API.

## Dataset Details

### Dataset Description

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- **Curated by:** Carl Boettiger
- **License:** CC-BY-NC, FishBase.org Team

### Dataset Sources 

<https://fishbase.org>, <https://sealifebase.org>, via exclusive export of backend MySQL databases.

## Uses

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### Direct Use

This data is provided to facilitate access to fishbase statistics through `rfishbase`.
Curation has evolved over the past decade and now provides basically direct access to versioned snapshots of the fishbase backend data.


### Out-of-Scope Use

Reuse of this data is not licensed for commerical applications. Developers should contact the FishBase team directly. See <https://fishbase.org> for details.

## Dataset Structure

Data provided here are raw CSV and parquet exports from the MySQL database backend powering <https://fishbase.org> and its sister site, <https://sealifebase.org>.
Please note that there are many tables here which have evolved over decades and were not developed with the intent of ever supporting direct access by end users. 
The data structure can be highly unintuitive and common tasks may require joins across multiple tables.  These files represent a snapshot in time as indicated
by the version numbers (e.g. v24.07 is data snapshot dated to July of 2024).  

## Dataset Creation

Dataset creation relies on ingesting a MySQL dump provided roughly annually from the FishBase team to this maintainer.  Current process imports this into
a MySQL (mariadb) server in docker, connects a the `duckdb` `mysql` extension and exports as parquet and csv, as shown in the `creation.py` script.



### Source Data

See <https://fishbase.org> for details.