THROWBACK THURSDAY: DR. PAULY IN THE WHITE HOUSE SCIENCE FORUM

Dr. Daniel Pauly at a White House event on citizen science. (Source: Sea Around Us)

We take pride as SeaLifeBase’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly speaks in the recently held discussion of the Oceans and Coasts session of the “Open Science and Innovation: Of the people, by the people, for the people”, a live-webcast forum of the White House held last September 30, 2015. The event was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Domestic Policy Council, having three objectives: (1) to celebrate the successes of citizen science and crowdsourcing; (2) to raise awareness of the benefits these innovative approaches can deliver and; (3) to motivate more Federal agencies and Americans to take advantage of these approaches [1].

In this forum, Dr. Pauly presented FishBase and briefly discussed the efforts of its project staff in the Philippines in gathering and extracting data from vast references in order to make information on all fishes become freely available to the world through the database. FishBase, an online information system founded more than 25 years ago, has grown to become one of the largest global database sources (GSDs) that provides systematic information on all fishes of the world including Etheostoma obama and Teleogramma obamaorum, two species of fish named in honor of President Obama. The database has received almost 50 million hits from over half a million users in a month and has been cited by more than 5000 scientific studies over the past decade, based from the Google scholar [2].

The forum was participated by respected citizen science professionals, researchers, stakeholders from different levels of the government, acadaemia as well as the non-profits and private sectors. It is such an honor for the whole FishBase team to be recognized as a successful science project by the White House. SeaLifeBase and  the whole FishBase Information and Research Group Inc. (FIN) family are very proud of what FishBase, with its founders, Dr. Pauly and Dr. Rainer Froese, have achieved.

Cheers! For future great collaborations that this opportunity might bring.

Watch the complete footage of the event here.

Links to other posts about the event: for Sea Around Us and for FishBase.

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[1] Kalil, T. and D. Wilkinson.  Accelerating Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to Address Societal andScientific Challenges. Published on September 30, 2015. [Accessed 10/22/2015].

[2] The FishBase Project Facebook page. Coming Soon: FishBase in the White House! Published on September 28, 2015.  [Accessed 10/22/2015].

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