Freshwater Information Platform

Welcome

Welcome to the freshwaterecology.info database. Here you can find autecological characteristics, ecological preferences and biological traits as well as distribution patterns of more than 20,000 European freshwater organisms belonging to fish, macro-invertebrates, macrophytes, diatoms and phytoplankton.

The ecology data feature distributional parameters (e.g. ecoregional distribution or endemism, etc.), regional parameters (e.g. stream zonation or altitudinal preference, etc.), habitat parameters (e.g. temperature or substrate preference, etc.) or life related parameters (e.g. feeding type or life duration, etc.) and others. All ecological parameters can be individually combined and queried.

Organism groups

link to fish database link to macro-invertebrate database link to macrophyte database link to diatom database link to phytoplankton database
Query your preferred organism group. Query more than one ecological parameter. Define special interests and features.

Tools

link to quick search link to taxa entry tool link to taxa entry tool
Find your freshwater organism and its ecological preferences (» Quick Search).
Create your standardised taxalist for each of the organism groups and enter data for up to 230 samples (» TET - Taxa Entry Tool).
Upload your taxalist, validate it and export your taxa including selected ecological parameters (» TVT - Taxa Validation Tool).

News

25th of October 2016: Version 7.0 launched online!

We are happy to announce that version 7.0 went online. This new version includes several minor changes in the background to ensure user convenience.
The main innovation is the inclusion of trait information according to the work of Henri Tachet and colleagues (Tachet H., Bournaud M., Richoux P. & Usseglio-Polatera P. (2010): Invertébrés d'eau douce - systématique, biologie, écologie. CNRS Editions, Paris, 600 p.), resulting in Europe's most comprehensive trait collection for macro-invertebrates. We are grateful to Henri Tachet for giving permission to make these data available online and to Philippe Usseglio-Polatera for providing the data and the brief explanations for each of the traits!

27th July 2015: New registration process

To facilitate the registration process, we have now added a » registration site. Just enter your name, institute and research interests and you will be provided with a login and password within a few days.

Previous news

Previous news can be found in the » News archive.

Login and contact

The data presented on this website result from various EU-funded projects. We encourage a broad use of the data for purposes in science and water management. Before accessing the majority of the data, however, we kindly ask you to register, you will then get a username and a password. This procedure will ensure that we can notify you of major updates of the database. Please go to » Registration for your personal login.

The freshwaterecology.info database is a "living document" and therefore permanently under improvement. If you want to contribute to the database, detect any error, encounter problems during the query process or have any suggestion for improvemen regarding design, content, user-friendliness and accessibility, please feel free to contact » Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber (astrid.schmidt-kloiber@boku.ac.at)

Citation

To acknowledge the extensive work of our experts PLEASE ALWAYS CITE the database CORRECTLY!!! We provide all kind of small tools to create the correct citations that can easily be pasted in your reference list (check the , icons). Details on the citation can be found in the » Terms of use (citation) section and in the help under » How to find the correct references and citation.

Background publication

We have published the work on freshwaterecology.info summarsing our efforts of the past ten years in Ecological Indicators:

Schmidt-Kloiber, A. & Hering D. (2015): www.freshwaterecology.info - an online tool that unifies, standardises and codifies more than 20,000 European freshwater organisms and their ecological preferences. Ecological Indicators. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.02.007

Support

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