Freshwater fish diversity database of central india: Implementation and utility

Abstract

The modern relational database technologies provide reasonable approaches to address the biodiversity problems facilitating storage, efficient searches and retrieval of information about species of interest. This contribution focuses on development of a digital database to view fish and fisheries information using integrated tools. To address storing and reporting of information on the fish diversity of the central states of India, MS Access relational database management system for backend and Visual Basic technologies for frontend under Windows operating platform were used. Development of the database was essential to store the data compiled from various published sources; to provide information-oriented services as well as to keep the data up-to-date with the recent information. Presently, the database covers 208 species of fishes belonging to 13 orders, 35 families and 82 genera from Madhya Pradesh; 155 species belonging to 11 orders, 30 families and 81 genera from Rajasthan and 144 species belonging to 11 orders, 30 families and 85 genera from Chhattisgarh. The application features of the database includes search, query and action command button tools that provide ability for retrieving and viewing the information of interest from the database.