Standardized distribution maps for over 33,500 species of fishes, marine mammals and invertebrates. AquaMaps is a joint project of FishBase and SealifeBase.
AquaMaps is a tool for generating model-based, large-scale predictions of natural occurrences of marine species. The model uses estimates of environmental preferences with respect to depth, water temperature, salinity, primary productivity, dissolved oxygen, and association with sea ice or coastal areas. These estimates of species preferences, called environmental envelopes, are derived from large sets of occurrence data available from online collection databases such as GBIF (gbif.org) and OBIS (obis.org), and from independent knowledge from the literature about the distribution of a given species and its habitat usage that are available in FishBase (www.fishbase.org) and in SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org). The environmental envelopes are matched against local environmental conditions to determine the suitability of a given area in the ocean for a particular species. Predictions of relative probabilities of species occurrence are shown as color-coded species range maps in a global grid of half-degree latitude and longitude cell dimensions. The maps are displayed on the web through the use of C-squares Mapper developed at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia (Rees, 2002, 2003).