A shared record of Madagascar's endemic freshwater fishes.

Madagascar's freshwater fish are the most imperiled vertebrate group on the island. Of the 156 described and undescribed endemic species in the registry, the majority are assessed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, and a significant share have no known captive population to serve as a demographic safety net. Coordination across the institutions working on these species — zoos, aquariums, academic researchers, hobbyist breeders, and in-country field programs — has historically relied on email threads, personal networks, and one-off spreadsheets.

This platform is a single, open record of what is known: which species exist, how they are assessed, where they have been observed, and which institutions hold captive populations. It aggregates from authoritative upstream sources rather than competing with them, and publishes back to them (via Darwin Core Archives) where the data flow is appropriate.

Public profiles cover every endemic species in the registry, including undescribed morphospecies that do not yet appear on the IUCN Red List. Conservation status mirrors the most recent accepted assessment; species with no assessment are marked "not yet assessed" rather than given a stale category. The distribution map shows locality records generalized per GBIF sensitive-species protocols; exact coordinates for threatened species are restricted to coordinator-tier accounts to protect wild populations.

Restricted tiers support ex-situ breeding coordination, transfer recommendations, and studbook-level data for registered partners. Those features are not visible on the public site.

Species and assessment data are pulled from the IUCN Red List and FishBase. Occurrence records follow the Darwin Core standard and can be published to GBIF. Captive-population figures are entered by partner institutions and, where available, reconciled with ZIMS (Species360). Priority lists from SHOAL (1,000 Fishes Blueprint) and CARES inform filtering and sort order but do not override IUCN categories.

The platform's Darwin Core Archive — used by GBIF's Integrated Publishing Toolkit — is available for direct download as mffcp-occurrences.zip. Threatened-species coordinates are generalized to a 0.1° (≈11 km) grid; exact coordinates remain on the platform behind the coordinator-tier gate.

For a fuller account of provenance, the mirror policy for IUCN status, coordinate generalization, and known limitations, see how we handle the data.

Definitions of IUCN categories, CARES, Darwin Core, and other terminology used across the site are collected in the glossary.

Maintained by Aleksei Saunders. Long-term stewardship is under discussion with partner organizations. Source code: github.com/AlekseiSaunders/malagasyfishes. Licensed Apache-2.0.

• Leiss L, Rauhaus A, Rakotoarison A, Fusari C, Vences M, Ziegler T. Review of threatened Malagasy freshwater fishes in zoos and aquaria: The necessity of an ex situ conservation network — A call for action. Zoo Biol. 2022 May;41(3):244–262. doi:10.1002/zoo.21661. PMID: 34870879; PMCID: PMC9299897.
• IUCN. Red List of Threatened Species. Version consulted at build time; category and criteria mirrored from the most recent accepted assessment per species.
• SHOAL. 1,000 Fishes Blueprint — global conservation priorities for freshwater fishes.
• GBIF. Darwin Core Archive standard and sensitive-species coordinate-generalization guidance.