UPFBase—A freshwater fish diversity database of Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

Worldwide, global databases on fishes lack fish diversity information at regional scale of a country, which has fascinated many fishery workers to know the regional scale fish diversity. Databases are essential part of the biodiversity science and have been used widely in the biological research. The present study discusses development, services and utility of the database application (UPFBase) providing information on the freshwater fish biodiversity of Uttar Pradesh. To develop UPFBase, data on the fish biodiversity of this region was compiled from different sources that include primary data generated from different projects and secondary data from published literatures. The collected data were screened and then digitized. Microsoft ACCESS relational database and Visual Basic language technologies were used for designing and implementing the standalone database application with the data management capability. Presently, UPFBase provides taxonomy, synonyms, local name, common name, morphology, biology, distribution, habitat, economic importance, conservation status and other fishery information on 129 fishes belonging to 11 orders and 27 families. UPFBase is user friendly and provides ease in working through search, query and action command button tools. It can easily be deployed on the mobile storages devices like CD-ROM, Pen drive, PCMCIA etc and can be installed on any Windows based Intel x86 machines. This version of UPFBase was built for countries, where computational hardware and software resources are in scare and it is expected that it might play imperious role in knowing and managing the indigenous fish diversity for decision making and posterity.