Rainer Froese (born 25 August 1950 in

Wismar Wismar (; Low German: ''Wismer''), officially the Hanseatic City of Wismar (''Hansestadt Wismar'') is, with around 43,000 inhabitants, the sixth-largest city of the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and the fourth-largest city ...

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

) is a senior

scientist A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosoph ...

at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research (GEOMAR) in

Kiel Kiel () is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 246,243 (2021). Kiel lies approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the southeast of the Jutland ...

, formerly the

Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences The GEOMAR - Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR), former ''Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences'' ( German: ''Leibniz-Institut für Meereswissenschaften'', IFM-GEOMAR), is a research institute in Kiel, Germany. It was formed in 200 ...

(IFM-GEOMAR), and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation.Marine Fellow: Rainer Froese
''Pew Environment Group''. He obtained an MSc in Biology in 1985 at the

University of Kiel Kiel University, officially the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, (german: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, abbreviated CAU, known informally as Christiana Albertina) is a university in the city of Kiel, Germany. It was founded in ...

and a PhD in Biology in 1990 from the

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vo ...

. Early in his career, he worked at the Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM in Kiel) on computer-aided identification systems and the life strategies of fish larvae. His current research interests include fish information systems,

marine biodiversity Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. M ...

, marine biogeography, and the

population dynamics of fisheries A fishery is an area with an associated fish or aquatic population which is harvested for its commercial or recreational value. Fisheries can be wild or farmed. Population dynamics describes the ways in which a given population grows and shrinks ...

and

large marine ecosystem Large marine ecosystems (LMEs) are regions of the world's oceans, encompassing coastal areas from river basins and estuaries to the seaward boundaries of continental shelves and the outer margins of the major ocean current systems. They are rela ...

s. Froese is best known for his work developing and maintaining FishBase, a large and widely accessed online information system on fish. From 1990 until 2000, Froese lead the development of FishBase at

ICLARM WorldFish is an international nonprofit research institution that creates and translates scientific research on aquatic food systems. WorldFish is a member of CGIAR, which unites international organizations engaged in research about food secur ...

in Manila. Since 2000, he has coordinated the large international consortium that now oversees FishBase. Its searchable database contains 34,000 fish species and the site receives over 30 million views each month. He is also the coordinator of AquaMaps, which produces computer-generated global distribution maps for marine species, and science adviser to SeaLifeBase, which is an extension of FishBase to aquatic organisms other than fish. Froese has authored or co-authored over 100 scientific publications. In 1998, along with

Daniel Pauly Daniel Pauly is a French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries and in 2020 was the most cited fisheries scientist in the world. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us ...

and others, Froese authored an influential paper called ''

Fishing down marine food webs Fishing down the food web is the process whereby fisheries in a given ecosystem, "having depleted the large predatory fish on top of the food web, turn to increasingly smaller species, finally ending up with previously spurned Forage fish, small f ...

''.

Pauly D Paul Michael DelVecchio Jr. (born July 5, 1980), known as Pauly D and DJ Pauly D, is an American television personality and DJ. He is best known for being a cast member of MTV's reality show '' Jersey Shore''. In 2011, he made a three-album d ...

, Christensen V, Dalsgaard J, Froese R and Torres F (1998
"Fishing down marine food webs"
''Science'', 279: 860–863. The paper examined the consequences of preferentially targeting large

predator fish Predatory fish are hypercarnivorous fish that actively prey upon other fish or aquatic animals, with examples including shark, billfish, barracuda, pike/muskellunge, walleye, perch and salmon. Some omnivorous fish, such as the red-bellied piranh ...

over smaller

forage fish Forage fish, also called prey fish or bait fish, are small pelagic fish which are preyed on by larger predators for food. Predators include other larger fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Typical ocean forage fish feed near the base of the foo ...

. As a result, the

fishing industry The fishing industry includes any industry or activity concerned with taking, culturing, processing, preserving, storing, transporting, marketing or selling fish or fish products. It is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization as including ...

has been "

fishing down the food web Fishing down the food web is the process whereby fisheries in a given ecosystem, "having depleted the large predatory fish on top of the food web, turn to increasingly smaller species, finally ending up with previously spurned Forage fish, small f ...

", and the mean trophic level in the oceans has progressively decreased. More recently, in a 2011 letter to ''Nature'', he stated that the European Common Fisheries Policy "consistently gets to overrule scientific advice and drive fish stocks to the brink of collapse. Without massive subsidies, European fisheries would be bankrupt: the cost of hunting the few remaining fish would exceed the income from selling the catch."Froese R (2011
"Fishery reform slips through the net"
'' Nature'', Letter, 475: 7.
Expanded version
/ref>

Some publications

* Froese R, Stern-Pirlot A, Winker H and Gascuel D (2008
"Size matters: How single-species management can contribute to ecosystem-based fisheries management"
''Fisheries Research'', 92(2–3): 231–241. * Froese R (2006
"Cube law, condition factor and weight-length relationships: history, meta-analysis and recommendations"
''Journal of Applied Ichthyology'', 22(4): 241–253. * Froese R, Piatkowski U, Garthe S and Pauly D (2005
"Trophic signatures of marine organisms in the Mediterranean as compared with other ecosystems". ''Belgian Journal of Zoology''
134: 31–36. * Froese R (2004
"Keep it simple: three indicators to deal with overfishing"
''Fish and Fisheries'', 5(1): 86–91. * Froese R and Sampang A (2004
"Taxonomy and biology of seamount fishes"
''Fisheries Centre'', Research Reports, 12(5): 25–31. * Froese R, Lloris D and Opitz S (2004
"The need to make scientific data publicly available – concerns and possible solutions"
Pages 268–271. In: MLD Palomares, B Samb, T Diouf, JM Vakily and D Pauly (eds) ''Fish Biodiversity: Local studies as basis for global inferences''. ACP-EU Fisheries Research Report 14, 283 p. * Froese R, Binohlan C (2003
"Simple methods to obtain preliminary growth estimates for fishes"
''Applied Ichthyology'', 19: 376–379. * Froese R, Bisby FA and Wilson KL (eds) (2003
''Species 2000 & ITIS catalogue of life 2003: indexing the world's known species''
CD-ROM. * Froese R and Kesner-Reyes K (2002
"Impact of fishing on the abundance of marine species"
''ICES CM'', (12). * Froese R and Binohlan C (2000
"Empirical relationships to estimate asymptotic length, length at first maturity and length at maximum yield per recruit in fishes, with a simple method to evaluate length frequency data"
''Journal of Fish Biology'', 56: 758–773. * Froese R and Palomares M (2000
"Growth, natural mortality, length-weight relationship, maximum length and length-at-first-maturity of the coelacanth ''Latimeria chalumnae''"
''Environ. Biol. Fish.'' 58: 45–52 *

, Christensen V, Froese R and Palomares M (2000
"Fishing Down Aquatic Food Webs"
''American Scientist'', 88(1): 46–51. * Froese R and Pauly D (eds) (2000) ''FishBase: 2000: concepts, design and data sources'', ICLARM (344 pp). 4 CD-ROMs * Froese R (1999
"The good, the bad, and the ugly: A critical look at species and their institutions from a user's perspective"
''Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries'', 9: 375–378. * Froese R and Torres A (1999
"Fishes under threat: An analysis of the fishes in the 1996 IUCN Red List"
Towards policies for conservation and sustainable use of aquatic genetic resources, ''ICLARM Conf. Proc.'', 59: 277f. * Froese R, Bailly N, Coronado GU, Pruvost P, Reyes R and Hureau JC (1999
"A new procedure to clean up fish collection databases"
pp. 697–7. Proceedings of the 5th Indo-Pacific Fisheries Conference, Nouméa, New Caledonia, B Seret and JY Sire, Society of French Ichthyologists, Paris. * Froese R (1996
"A data-rich approach to assess biodiversity"
In: ''Biodiversity in Asia: challenges and opportunities for the scientific community'', JA McNeely and S Somchevita (eds). Office of Environmental Policy and Planning, Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, Bangkok, pp. 127–136.
Full list of publications

Notes

References

Biological Information Systems
''IFM-GEOMAR'', Retrieved 28 July 2011.

External links

* video, 13 September 2010.

''Der Spiegel'', 12 July 2011.
Towards healthy stocks and healthy profits in European fisheries
Presentation at Hearing: "How much fish can be safely caught?", 3 May 2011, Brussels.
Trends in Global Fisheries Likely Causes & Possible Solutions
Presentation at the WTO Forum in Geneva, 17 September 2010.
AquaMaps
Presentation at EDIT Symposium in Kiel, 18 January 2011.
Rainier Froese on FishBase
Retrieved 18 July 2011.
FishBase: Brief History and Consortium
5 May 2006. {{DEFAULTSORT:Froese, Rainer 1950 births Fisheries scientists Living people University of Kiel alumni University of Hamburg alumni 20th-century German zoologists 21st-century German zoologists

Some publications

See also

Notes

References

External links