FISHGLOB is an international consortium of scientists, experts and data providers who collect, curate, standardize, share (according to FAIR principles) and analyse data from scientific bottom trawl surveys (SBTS). FISHGLOB aims to create a sustainable infrastructure that brings together marine data and experts from countries worldwide to form a network of scientists, governmental agencies, and stakeholders. By facilitating open and multinational science, our activities will enable the understanding and prediction of fish diversity change and help to guide management actions. SBTS are one of the most widespread and long-running forms of ocean ecosystem monitoring, providing invaluable time-series of marine fish biodiversity over decades of global change. Our consortium has three goals: to provide standardized metadata, to harmonize full data (eg. abundance, biomass) of disparate bottom trawl surveys, and to create an international community of practice. FISHGLOB’s goals and accomplishments are described in a recent preprint and during a 2024 conference in Montpellier, France.
Since June 2023, FISHGLOB is a UN Ocean Decade project, co-led by Aurore Maureaud, Bastien Mérigot, and Deng Palomares. From 2020-2023, a FISHGLOB working group led by Bastien Mérigot and Deng Palomares was funded by the French Biodiversity Foundation (FRB-CESAB), the Canadian Institute for Ecology & Evolution (CIEE), and the French embassy in Canada.