If you are aware of any useful web sites that you think should be listed here, please let me know!
Thanks,
Howard Browman

Miscellaneous links to interesting/useful material

American Fisheries Society, Early Life History Section – The purpose of this web site is to provide a rapid means to disseminate information to Early Life History Section (ELHS) members and anyone looking for information about the ELHS section.

The Annual Larval Fish Conference

The SeaLifeBase Project – The long-term goal of this project is to create and maintain a FishBase-like information system for all aquatic living organisms (marine and freshwater).

The FishBase Project – FishBase is a relational database containing information on fishes and designed to meet the needs of different professional groups such as research scientists, fisheries managers, zoologists and many more. FishBase on the web contains information on practically all of the fish species known to science.

The LarvalBase Project – The LarvalBase Project is being developed in conjunction with FishBase. FishBase contains little information on ichthyoplankton and lacks detailed data on identification and rearing of fish larvae. The LarvalBase Project is intended to close this gap.

Diversity and Geographic Distribution of Marine Planktonic Copepods. A database of information about marine copepods.

Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium  – The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) was formed in 1979 to coordinate and stimulate Louisiana’s activities in marine research and education. LUMCON provides coastal laboratory facilities to Louisiana universities, and conducts in-house research and educational programs in the marine sciences.

Fisheries Oceanography at Dalhousie University – Chris Taggart’s lab at Dalhousie, and an overview of activities related to fish larvae being undertaken there.

The Cladoceran Web Site – The Cladoceran Web Site is intended to provide a variety of information useful to Cladoceran researchers and to those curious about these fascinating animals.

The plankton portal

Ocean Portal – Ocean Portal is a high-level directory of Ocean Data and Information related web sites. Its objective is to help scientists and other ocean experts in locating such data & information.

Canadian Conference for Fisheries Research – The Canadian Conference for Fisheries Research has been meeting annually for over 50 years now and continues to meet once a year in early January in concert with the Society of Canadian Limnologists (SCL). The conference is a forum where researchers and graduate students can present and discuss the latest advances in freshwater and marine fisheries research.

Sonke Johnsen’s Lab — Sensory Biology at Duke – The Johnsen Lab studies aspects of visual ecology. The guiding principle is that the species and methods used must serve the central question. Methods used include: protein biochemistry, electron and light microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral studies, net sampling, submersible operations, SCUBA diving, optical measurements of tissue and environment, and mathematical modeling. Marine pelagic species have been a strong focus, but benthic, freshwater and terrestrial systems have also been examined.

John Dower’s Fisheries Oceanography and Plankton Ecology site at University of Victoria – This is the John Dower lab’s web site. His research focuses on the various ways in which interactions between biology and physics structure pelagic marine ecosystems. He is particularly interested in the effect of physical variability on the ecology of (and interactions between) larval fish and zooplankton, and the ways in which variability in the physical environment regulates recruitment in marine fish populations.

Thomas Miller’s Lab – Research in Tom’s group focuses on developing a quantitative understanding of the ecology of aquatic populations, with a particular focus on fish and crustacea. Current research themes focus on processes that select individuals, regulate populations and structure communities.

Claire Paris’s Lab at University of Miami

EurOcean – EurOcean is a focal point for information in Europe on marine science and technology. The EurOcean Internet portal intends to be an electronic platform of communication and information for all actors with interest in marine science and technology in Europe.

Dennis Higg’s Lab – Fish Sensory Biology – Research largely focused around the area of sensory ecology of vertebrates.

Links to Visual Ecology and Ocean Optics Labs – This link will take you to a useful list compiled by Sonke Johnsen.

Links to Various Sensory Biology Websites – This link will take you to a useful list (organized by category) compiled by Sonke Johnsen.

Dr. Christopher B. Braun – Sensory Biology of Fishes – This web site covers the activity in Dr. Braun’s lab. All of his research can be related to the simple question: What do animals know about their world, and how do they know it?

Shifting Baselines – This site presents information on the (sad) state of the World’s oceans.

Guidelines for the use of fishes in research – The new and revised American Fisheries Society Guidelines were developed to provide a structure that ensures appropriate attention to valid experimental design and procedures while also ensuring humane treatment of the experimental subjects.

Australian Museum Larval Fishes Website – The Australian Museum Larval Fishes website includes a beautiful photo galley of fish larvae. There is also a brief glossary and links to other larval fish sites.

Coral Reef Fish – A website devoted to scientific communication for coral reef fish biologists.

Vision Ecology Lab – University of Queensland (Justin Marshall)

Vision in Cichlids and other fish, with an emphasis on retinal mosaics, by Henny ven der Meer

Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow

Jeannette Yen – sensory biology and behavior of copepods

Marc Weissburg– sensory biology (chemical ecology) of crustaceans

Center for Biologically Inspired Design

FishScope – images and movies about fish development

Laboratory of comparative sensory performance

Marine bioacoustics lab

Developmental Physiology

Evolutionary Physiology

WebVision – Everything you could want to know about the vertebrate retina and visual system

Anne-Wil Harzing’s web pages – full of interesting analyses about assessing scholarly performance

Publish or Perish – free online software (that uses Google Scholar) to track how your work is being cited

Developing alternatives to the journal impact factor – Usage Factor based upon document downloads

Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources = The COUNTER Project to evaluate online usage of scholarly journals.

Anthropogenic Ecotope Mapping – Erle C. Ellis’s Ecotope (AEM) web site, describing a standardized open-source mapping & classification system for measuring ecological structure, function and change across managed landscapes.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Fisheries and Aquaculture Department – Information about global assessments, policy and regulations.

The Sea Around Us – The Sea Around Us Project investigates the impact of fisheries on the world’s marine ecosystems. To achieve this, the project uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to map global fisheries catches from 1950 to the present, under explicit consideration of major critical habitats of fish, marine invertebrates, marine mammals and other components of marine biodiversity. The data presented, which are freely available, are meant to support studies of global fisheries trends and the development of sustainable, ecosystem-based fisheries policies.

European Union, Fisheries and Matitime Affairs

Oceana – A non-governmental organization devoted to marine conservation.

The Pew Charitable Trusts – A non-governmental organization devoted to marine conservation.

The World Ocean Network (WON) is an international association which comprises museums, aquaria, science centres, educational charities, institutions and non-governmental organizations. Its aim is to make the public aware of the importance of ocean to humanity and the impact of our daily actions on marine environment.

The Ocean Project helps its global network of zoos, aquariums, and museums (ZAMs) effectively educate their millions of visitors about how they can help protect and conserve our ocean planet.

GRID-Arendal is an official United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) collaborating centre, supporting informed decision making and awareness-raising through environmental information management and assessment; capacity building services; outreach and communication tools, methodologies and products.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a global partnership among 178 countries, international institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the private sector to address global environmental issues while supporting national sustainable development initiatives.

The Census of Marine Life (CoML) is a global network of researchers in about 80 nations engaged in a ten-year initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the world’s oceans – past, present and future.

The Future of Marine Animal Populations (FMAP) is a network of scientists within the Census of Marine Life trying to understand the past, present and future of marine life. FMAP attempts to describe and synthesize globally changing patterns of species abundance, distribution, and diversity, and to model the effects of fishing, climate change and other key variables on those patterns.

Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR). Recognition that scientific questions about the ocean often require an interdisciplinary approach led the International Council for Science (ICSU) to form the SCOR in 1957. SCOR activities focus on promoting international cooperation in planning and conducting oceanographic research, and solving methodological and conceptual problems that hinder research.

The Marine Conservation Society campaign for more marine reserves in Britain.

Greenpeace’s Defending Our Oceans Campaign.

Callum Roberts’ Unnatural History of the Sea web site.

The Oak Foundation’s Marine Conservation Programme – A non-governmental organization devoted to marine conservation.

Nippon Foundation, Maritime Affairs Division – A charitable not-for-profit that distributes 110 million USD per year in this area alone.

University of British Columbia, Fisheries Centre

FISAT II – a program package developed mainly for the analysis of length-frequency data, but also enables related analyses, of size-at-age, catch-at-age, selection and other analyses.

Ecopath and Ecosim – a free ecological/ecosystem modeling software suite. EwE has three main components: Ecopath – a static, mass-balanced snapshot of the system; Ecosim – a time dynamic simulation module for policy exploration; and Ecospace – a spatial and temporal dynamic module primarily designed for exploring impact and placement of protected areas.

Marxan is freely available conservation planning software. It provides decision support to a range of conservation planning problems, including: the design of new reserve systems; reporting on the performance of existing reserve systems; developing multiple-use zoning plans for natural resource management.

TED Talks. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. This site presents the talks delivered to the TED conference.

Online dictionary of ichthyology. Go here to find definitions of terms rellated to fish biology.

The digital fish library. The digital fish library at the University of California San Diego explores the diverse morphology of fish using magnetic resonance imaging. Go to their web site to see some amazing images!

The catalog of fishes. The Catalog of Fishes is the authoritative reference for taxonomic fish names, featuring a searchable on-line database.

John Caddy’s personal blog on his career as a fisheries scientist.

Ken Anderson and Jan Beyer’s single-species size spectrum simulator.

Henny van der Meer’s vision in cichlids webpage.

Resources for the humane killing of fishes – iki Jime

The West Coast Ocean Acidification & Hypoxia Science Panel

The Dynamic Energy Budget information page

Great website about zooplankton by Jonathan Cohen and Chris Petrone – Under the Scope

List of the most cited articles and books in fisheries science

CFOOD – The science of fisheries sustainability

Jason Ching’s website – amazing videos of wildlife, including salmon spawning runs!

CSIRO Centre for Marine Socioecology

NOAA Fisheries Human Dimensions Program

NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessments

Social wellbeing indicators for marine management

Peerage of Science – A new approach to peer review that is independent of journals. But will it catch on?

Authorea is an online collaborative editor for researchers, now has >8,000 journal style templates, allowing researchers to format and submit scientific content to virtually any scholarly journal. Authorea enhances the leading platform for researchers to create and format scholarly documents online. Instead of spending valuable hours tinkering with citation styling and guidelines, Authorea allows researchers to output research works in the correct format with the click of a button.

oaDOI – An oaDOI link is like a DOI, with a useful difference: if there’s an open access version of the article, the oaDOI URL will send you there, instead of the paywalled article landing page.

UNPAYWALL – Get full-text of research papers as you browse, using Unpaywall’s index of ten million legal, open-access articles.

bioRxiv – The preprint server for biology.

Quality Open Access Market. QOAM is a market place for scientific and scholarly journals which publish articles in open access. Quality scoring of the journals in QOAM is based on academic crowd sourcing; price information includes institutional licensed pricing.

ROAR – The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies.

INTACT Project – INTACT aims at establishing transparent and efficient procedures to manage article processing charges (APC) for open access publications.

FORCE11 – The future of research communications and e-scholarship

OA2020 initiative – Open Access 2020 is an international initiative that aims to induce the swift, smooth and scholarly-oriented transformation of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to open access publishing.

OPENUP Project – OpenUP addresses key aspects and challenges of the currently transforming science landscape and aspires to come up with a cohesive framework for the review-disseminate-assess phases of the research life cycle that is fit to support and promote Open Science.

Center for open science – Our mission is to provide expertise, tools, and training to help researchers create and promote open science within their teams and institutions.

CACHE-ITN Project – Shell production for shellfish farming and biotech in a changing world

Matt Doggett’s great web page of underwater photography and video + research projects

A visual introduction to probability and statistics

University of Washington lecture series on… BULLSHIT – what is it? What is the philosophy behind it? Why is there so much of it? Brandolini’s bullshit asymmetry principle. And more!

Trevor Branch’s compilation of autobiographies of famous fisheries/aquatic scientists

The backfire effect – is a name for the finding that, given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly. Read a cartoon-style article about it HERE.

Have a look at The Atlas for the End of the World.

2 May 2017 – Erle Ellis gave a talk on “From Pleistocene to Anthropocene: Why Humans Transformed Earth and Climate”. Watch it HERE.

Lots of articles and resources offering ACADEMIC ADVICE.

The experimental design assistant web site. Read an article about it HERE.

List of funding sources for PostDocs to conduct independent research.

Queensland University of Technology, Office of Research Ethics and Integrity – resources on authorship, publication, peer review, and more.

Origins of consciousness workshop of June 2017 – This one-day, interdisciplinary workshop brought together philosophers, neuroscientists, experimental biologists and evolutionary biologists to discuss the origins of consciousness. See the lectures HERE

The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can quickly understand what a metric means, how t is calculated, and if it’s a good match for your impact question.

Six essential reads about peer review

Cited Reference Explorer – Which are the most important papers in the history of a field? On whose shoulders of giants does an author stand? Where to look for the intellectual roots of a research topic? These questions can be answered by using the program Cited References Explorer (CRExplorer).

Code of ethics for researchers, prepared by the World Economic Forum

Tools for transparency in the reporting of research outputs in ecology and evolution

Christopher Dewees’s gyotaku art

Beall’s list of predatory journals and publishers

Stop predatory journals

How smart are fish? An interactive e-learning presentation.

The Story Collider – True, personal stories about science. Featuring all kinds of storytellers – researchers, doctors, and engineers of course, but also patients, poets, comedians, and more. Some of our stories are heartbreaking, others are hilarious. They’re all true and all very personal.

Kopernio is a browser plugin that finds the best available PDF of an academic article while you browse. Behind the scenes Kopernio will search open databases and (where possible) your university’s subscriptions to find the best version of the paper for you. The best article PDF is never more than a click away.

Sustaining Food From the Seas – 13 April 2017 lecture by Ray Hilborn
Books and reports worth having a look at

On Being a Scientist, U.S. National Academy of Science

Increasing capacity for stewardship of oceans and coasts, U.S. National Academy of Science

Ontogeny and systematics of fishes : based on an international symposium dedicated to the memory of Elbert Halvor Ahlstrom. The volume is available online, as a free open access document, HERE.

Articles from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla (including Ruben Lasker, John Hunter…) are available online, as free open access documents, HERE

Marine fish eggs and larvae from the east coast of South Africa

Fish Larval Physiology
. 2008. Edited by Roderick Nigel Finn and B.G. Kapoor. The book is intended as a resource for students and researchers interested in developmental biology and physiology and specifically addresses the larval stages of fish.

Early Life History of Marine Fishes. 2009. By Bruce S. Miller and Arthur W. Kendall, Jr. The life cycles of fishes are complex and varied, and knowledge of the early life stages is important for understanding the biology, ecology, and evolution of fishes.

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Hjort, J. (1914) Fluctuations in the great fisheries of northern Europe, viewed in the light of biological research. Rapports et Procès-Verbaux des Réunions du Conseil Permanent International pour l’Exploration de la Mer 20:1–228. Click HERE to download the PDF file of this seminal monograph.

Google Books NGram Viewer – When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years.

The Open Science Monitor – Interactive graphic presentation of trends in open access publishing.

SCOR Working Group on Changing Ocean Biological Systems has developed a great resource to support the design of multiple driver experiments. See the Decision Support Tool.

Linda Ianniello – Stunning underwater photography.

Espen Rekdal – More stunning underwater photography

trackR – A simple video tracking software in R.

3DTracker-FAB – An open source video tracking software.

Spatio-temporal moving – a list of resources (r-packages and code) to track moving particles and animals.

Do fish feel pain? – Debate on fish pain between Culum Brown and Steven Cooke on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio show The Current.

Eiko Jones – Beautiful underwater photography!

Fundamentals of data visualization, by Claus O. Wilke.

A linear model cheat sheet – Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats) by Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv

Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data (=FAIR) – a tool to determine if your data reporting is FAIR.

ReimagineReview is a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review

ACS Reviewer Lab – Peer-review training for scientific researchers

EPIGEUM – Online courses for researchers.

Paper Digest – Artificial Intelligence summarizes academic articles for you (?).

The Open Syllabus Project – An interactive visualization of the 165,000 most-frequently assigned texts in college courses worldwide. Search the Galaxy Map Visualization of syllabi HERE.

Journal-Author Name Estimator (JANE) – Have you recently written a paper, but you’re not sure to which journal you should submit it? Or maybe you want to find relevant articles to cite in your paper? Or are you an editor, and do you need to find reviewers for a particular paper? Jane can help!

e-book – Twitter for Scientists.

Connected papers is a unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.

Videos, satellite telemetry and observatories of marine life

Tagging of Pacific Predators – Real-time tracking of marine organisms.

The Plankton Chronicles Project is a short documentary series combining art and science, revealing the beauty and diversity of organisms adrift in the currents.

Videos for teaching ecology

The Plankton Chronicles – Beautiful videos of plankton!

The Virtual Copepod Page – On Professor Jules Jaffe’s Laboratory’s main page you will find a toggle titled “photos and data”. Follow this to the “Virtual Copepod Page” where you will discover some amazing animated sequences of copepod predatory behaviour!

OCEARCH – Real-time satellite tracking of the movements of great white sharks and other large apex predators.

Statoil/IMR ocean observatory – Real-time observations of ocean conditions, including video and acoustics, in Vesterålen.

The Gravity Machine

Last updated: August 15, 2022