Rainer Froese

Rainer Froese (born 25 August 1950 in Wismar, East Germany) is a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research (GEOMAR) in Kiel, formerly the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. He obtained an MSc in Biology in 1985 at the University of Kiel and a PhD in Biology in 1990 from the University of Hamburg. 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 biogeography, and the population dynamics of fisheries and large marine ecosystems.

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 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 and others, Froese authored an influential paper called ''Fishing down marine food webs''. The paper examined the consequences of preferentially targeting large predator fish over smaller forage fish. As a result, the fishing industry has been "fishing down the food web", 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." Provided by Wikipedia