infraFADA activities – news archive
- October 2023: The infraFADA project received its own project website at RBINS: infraFADA
- August 2023: BELSPO, the Belgian Science Policy, has approved a project to re-instate the FADA expert consortium and the FADA databases. The project, called “Upgrading the taxonomic backbone of global freshwater animal biodiversity research infrastructures – infraFADA”, will run from April 2023 till December 2026. infraFADA is a joint enterprise between the coordinating institute, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS, Brussels, Belgium) with Koen Martens as promotor, and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management (BOKU, Vienna, Austria), represented by Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber.
The history of the Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment – FADA
The initial FADA project emerged more than 20 years ago in the context of the international decade "Water for Life". The major aim of FADA was to provide a global assessment of freshwater animal biodiversity to help define conservation strategies and priorities.
The project started in September 2002 and ended in June 2003. It consisted of the first approximate global assessment of freshwater animal biodiversity based on existing databases, published reviews, and scientific expertise. The objective was to produce a preliminary discussion document that mainly identified gaps in our knowledge and could be used for discussion. This study, supported by the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris, France) identified c 100,000 known freshwater animal species and resulted in a paper in 2005:
A second phase, funded by the Belgian Science Policy (Belspo) started in March 2005 and was carried out until 2008. The objective was to implement a more complete review of animal diversity in freshwaters. About 60 leading taxonomists were involved in assembling a team of close to 150 experts who gathered global information on specific and generic diversity for each animal group, as well as their zoogeographical distribution and endemicity.
The results of this initiative identified more than 125,000 species and more than 11,000 genera. These results were published in 59 chapters of a special issue of the international journal Hydrobiologia:
Balian, E., C. Lévêque, H. Segers & K. Martens (Eds.), 2008: Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment. Hydrobiologia 595: 637 pp.
This first complete and global assessment highlighted gaps in the basic knowledge of freshwater animal biodiversity richness at zoogeographical and global scales. Some groups were far less studied, and data on their diversity and distribution were more scarce than for others. Furthermore, also the freshwater fauna of certain zoogeographic regions was far less studied than others.
Between 2009 and 2013, FADA became part of the EU-funded project “Biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems: status, trends, pressures and conservation priorities” (BioFresh). During these four years, the real FADA database, with taxa checklists for dozens of freshwater animal groups, was compiled by the FADA consortium of taxonomic experts. The BioFresh team built the software behind the database, while the database itself was hosted by the Belgian Biodiversity Platform (BBPf).
After 2013, the database continued to be hosted by the BBPf, but limited progress was made in building and upgrading its content. However, in that period FADA became one of the building blocks of the Freshwater Information Platform (FIP), a European-based research infrastructure which was created out of the old BioFresh website, and is presently governed by a consortium of four partners: BOKU University, Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management, Vienna (Austria); Aquatic Ecology, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Essen (Germany); Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin (Germany); Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Brussels (Belgium).
Starting in 2014, the two years project AquaRES – funded by Beslpo – represented a collaboration with the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) which hosts the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). In the framework of this project, data In FADA were improved and extended by updating the import procedures and ensuring that relevant data is synchronised with other aquatic species registers.
Since 2023, Belspo funded the new project “Upgrading the taxonomic backbone of global freshwater animal biodiversity research infrastructures” (infraFADA), which will run until the end of 2026. In this project, FADA is becoming more ambitious and goes beyond building a database of freshwater animal taxa; it aims to link the FADA taxa lists as taxonomic backbone to international research infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Catalogue of Life (CoL) and the Freshwater Information Platform (FIP).
