California Fish Databases / datasets
Fans of North American freshwater fishes will be interested to know that there are several online resources for obtaining information about California’s native and introduced freshwater fish fauna. I recently discovered two of these resources, the Native Fish Species By Location - California Fish Site of the California Freshwater Fish Laboratory, led by Lisa Thompson, and the California fish distribution datasets from The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Hexagon Project (Data Basin Gallery), developed by Peter Moyle and Paul Randall at UC Davis.
These are fun to cruise through. And if you are interested in useable data on the subject, it can be extracted from either database. For example, the Thompson lab website allows you to search through each of California’s counties, and it looks like the Hexagon Project’s (TNC category “confident” etc.) shapefiles of species distributions are available from Data Basin.
~J