Climate change affects fish globally. Yet, a comprehensive, online public database of how climate change has impacted inland fishes worldwide did not exist, until now.  Introducing FiCli, a worldwide updatable database of the latest research on climate change and fish.

Creating FiCli was an immense undertaking, involving an extensive review of the literature on climate change impacts on inland fish, first in North America and later globally. These efforts were led byThese efforts were led by Trevor Krabbenhoft, assistant professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo, Abby Lynch, a Research Fish Biologist with the National CASC, and Bonnie Myers, a Fish Biologist with the National CASC and a PhD candidate in the NC State’s Department of Applied Ecology and the North Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. The standardized database can be used by managers and researchers to collect the information they need to better predict future responses of different fish families and species to climate change across a range of geographic regions.

User are also able to submit new research as database entries that are then reviewed and uploaded by the project team. This will allow FiCli to continue to be a source for up-to-date information on the impacts of climate change on inland fish, serving as an important resource for fisheries managers in a changing climate.

“In the early stages, FiCli provided a much needed resource to my colleagues and me to understand and synthesize global impacts of climate change on inland fishes,” says Myers. “As we continued to develop the database, we realized FiCli could be a useful resource to the scientific and management community to inform research questions and management decisions for specific fish species and geographic locations. I hope FiCli continues to evolve as we add the most up-to-date published literature to improve the conservation and management of inland fishes as climate continues to change.”

A detailed description of FiCli is in Scientific Data, a NatureResearch journal. All data and code are available by the USGS.

In addition to Krabbenhoft, Myers, and Lynch, co-authors of the Scientific Data paper include:

• Jesse P. Wong at George Mason University
• Cindy Chu, PhD, at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry
• Ralph W. Tingley III, PhD, at the Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit housed at the University of Missouri
• Jeffrey A. Falke, PhD, at the Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit housed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
• Thomas J. Kwak, PhD, at the North Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit housed at NC State’s Department of Applied Ecology
• Craig P. Paukert, PhD, at the Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit

The American Fisheries Society funded workshops that led to the FiCli database, with in-kind support from the USGS National Climate Adaptation Science Center and the Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.

This study was funded in part by the National CASC project “Fish and Climate Change (FiCli) Database: Informing climate change adaptation and management actions for freshwater fishes.“