Rainer Froese

Research

Rainer Froese is a senior scientist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. Together with Daniel Pauly, Froese “invented” FishBase, the world’s most widely used biological information system (more than half a million visitors per month). Since 1990 Froese has served as FishBase’s project leader and coordinator. With his Pew fellowship, Froese worked with an international partnership to develop the first comprehensive online marine atlas, which he named AquaMaps. He envisioned this project as an opportunity to provide a whole new level and type of marine mapping capability. Prior to this project, there were few marine databases with accurate species identification along with precise geographic location information. Froese developed a series of partnerships that provided the support, data, and software to develop AquaMaps. He planned and put in place two international workshops to assemble a core team of experts, produce a grand plan for the atlas, and begin gathering, creating, and making available online thousands of computer-generated, standardized distribution maps. Due to its comprehensive nature and its dynamic visual mapping abilities, AquaMaps enabled new insights into species distribution and ecosystem dynamics. It also signifies a quantum leap forward in science’s understanding of the distributions of marine species in space and time. The work has enormous potential for a wide range of applications, including conservation policy. To learn more about Froese, visit his bio online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Froese