As avid trail conservationists, Love Our Trails is passionate about preserving natural pathways and their surrounding ecosystems, preventing erosion and safeguarding the quality and flow of nearby water sources. So it’s only natural that we are in full support of The Freshwater Research Centre, which is doing incredible work in freshwater science to support and protect Africa’s fragile aquatic ecosystems.
This June, The Freshwater Research Centre has launched an urgent appeal to every freshwater biodiversity data holder in South Africa to add their data to the FBIS platform.
The problem
Valuable biodiversity datasets are trapped on hard drives across the country after serving a single purpose – never to be used again. Meanwhile, South Africa’s freshwater species (fish and amphibians in particular) are disappearing faster than any other taxonomic group.
The opportunity
These forgotten datasets could be the key to saving South Africa’s rivers, wetlands, and the incredible life they support. Together, we can help rescue valuable data from digital dustbins and transform it into conservation action.
The goal
Add 150,000 new taxon records to FBIS by June 30th – taking them from 850K to 1 million records.
How to help
- Check if your data is already on FBIS
- Format your spreadsheet (just 5 simple requirements) – details here https://shorturl.at/IWtrV
- Email it to fbis@frcsa.org.za by 30 June 2025
Healthy aquatic ecosystems provide vital habitats for freshwater biodiversity and critical services for people, like clean drinking water. When it comes to managing our freshwaters, better data equals better decisions.
The South African Scoring System (SASS for short) is a biomonitoring tool that uses the sensitivity scores of riverine invertebrates to estimate the health of the river ecosystem upstream. And so the more SASS data we have access to, the deeper our understanding of the health of South Africa’s rivers and how they are changing.
The FBIS is a spatial data platform for hosting and serving freshwater biodiversity data in South Africa. It standardises datasets from different sources and formats, and provides powerful tools for visualising and filtering data – thereby facilitating evaluation of long-term change in freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem condition and supporting data-driven conservation planning, ecosystem management and decision-making.
Written by Karen Doyle – Freelance Writer and Editor.