About FreshwaterLife

A collaborative website providing easy access to freshwater information.

The main aim of FreshwaterLife is to bring together information on freshwater and the organisms that live in freshwater habitats. By giving easy access to information, FreshwaterLife will educate and inform, and promote the importance of the world's freshwaters.

Within the overall framework, FreshwaterLife has 4 principle focus areas, or work programmes:

• The habitat and life-history of freshwater animals and plants is captured in the FreshwaterLife Ecological Database.
• Identification guides and training tools, principally through online taxonomic keys.
• Collation and promotion of standards and methods for scientific research, monitoring, policy implementation and biological data storage and exchange.
• Improving the flow of information and discussion between different parties involved with freshwater (researchers, regulators, policy makers and implementers and the general public). A vehicle for this is the FreshwaterLife Network.

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FreshwaterLife works on the principle of collaboration. That by working together, with each individual or organisation contributing their part, the whole can become much more useful to everyone.

Anyone can browse the FreshwaterLife website (or portal) to find the information they want. Anyone can join FreshwaterLife by filling in a simple online form. Once you have joined you can add new information (websites, documents, databases, organisations, news articles, job opportunities), start a topic discussion or suggest changes to the structure of the website. Once it has gone through an editorial quality control process, the new information will be added to FreshwaterLife and will be available to all users.

The FreshwaterLife Information Management System (IMS) is the technology that makes all this possible. Developed over several years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) this technology has been adapted to the needs of FreshwaterLife in collaboration with the FAO Fisheries Department.

When you are browsing FreshwaterLife you will be using IMS without realising it. IMS organises all the informatin in FreshwaterLife and presents it in the structured form of the FreshwaterLife website. This powerful software gives order to all the various information in FreshwaterLife with many resulting benefits. For example when you type a search in the search bar at the top of the screen, IMS searches all of FreshwaterLife for your information. It also searches any documents that have been added and the first few pages of any website that have been linked to FreshwaterLife.