A global dataset of freshwater fish trophic interactions

Freshwater management and research frequently rely on trophic data to manage freshwater fishes, yet it is difficult to perform a simple search of dietary information for any one species. FishBase represents the largest effort to organize freshwater dietary data into a singular, navigable dataset. Nonetheless, FishBase excludes a large portion of the ecological literature because it was developed before the creation of most modern scientific search engines. Our project, TroPhish, builds upon FishBase by digitizing over 100 years of data from the fish predation literature. Data from 1,106 published papers, theses, dissertations, and government reports were filtered, scanned in through third-party software (Able2Extract), reorganized, and consolidated with FishBase to form a unified dataset. This dataset contains 54,750 observations of data on 4,571 unique dietary samples, representing 9% (982) of all freshwater fish species and 43% (111) of all freshwater fish families. Fish species and family representation varied by continent, ranging from 3-32% and 34-75%, respectively. Users are encouraged to submit errors or additional data through GitHub's fork and pull model.