The Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment (FADA): a taxonomic backbone for global biodiversity databases

Koen Martens works at the Royal Belgian Institute of natural Sciences (Brussels, Belgium). He is guest professor at the UGent and visiting professor at the State University of Maringá (Brazil). His research interests are in aquatic ecology and evolutionary biology. He is editor in chief of Hydrobiologia since 2003. Freshwater covers less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, but 10% of all animals occur only in freshwaters, a discrepancy known as the “paradox of freshwater”. Several global data repositories (such as GBIF) document extant freshwater biodiversity, but require reliable taxonomic backbones. Currently, FADA (created by Koen in 2005) groups more than 125 thousand species and 11 thousand genera of freshwater animals. However, taxonomy is a living scientific discipline, where new taxa are being described and existing taxa are being placed in new taxonomic positions. infraFADA, a three-year BELSPO project, will develop FADA into a research infrastructure that serves as taxonomic backbone for a variety of global biodiversity databases.

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