Ali4333/fish-species-catalog

Fishing Species Catalog

An open, multilingual catalog of 196 sport-fishing species with biological metadata: scientific (binomial) names, English common names, multilingual aliases, saltwater/freshwater environment, a conservative latitude band, the seasonal months each species is typically catchable, and a conservation flag where relevant. It is published and maintained by FishRadar, the fishing-conditions app, and underpins the species guidance at fishradar.ai/fishing/ (see e.g. the bluefin tuna page). Released under CC BY 4.0.

• 💻 GitHub source repo: https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/fishing-species-catalog
• 🎣 Companion regulations dataset: Ali4333/fishing-regulations
• 🌐 App & web: https://fishradar.ai/fishing/

Highlights

• 196 species — 138 saltwater, 58 freshwater.
• Multilingual aliases — English plus Turkish, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Japanese where widely used. Ideal for cross-language fuzzy name matching.
• Stable kebab-case ids (european-seabass, bluefin-tuna) — safe foreign keys that never change. They join directly to the companion fishing-regulations dataset.
• Conservation flags — CITES Appendix II, no-retention, permit-required, IUCN Vulnerable.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Ali4333/fish-species-catalog", split="train")
print(ds[0])

# Build a multilingual alias -> id index
alias_index = {}
for r in ds:
    for name in [r["english"], r["scientific"], *r["aliases"]]:
        alias_index[name.lower()] = r["id"]
print(alias_index["levrek"])   # -> european-seabass
print(alias_index["branzino"]) # -> european-seabass

Fields

Field	Description
id	Stable English kebab-case slug (use as a key).
scientific	Binomial Latin name.
english	English common name (FAO standard preferred).
aliases	Common names across languages and regions.
environment	saltwater or freshwater.
latRange	[minLat, maxLat] conservative signed-degree band.
seasonMonths	Northern-Hemisphere months (1–12) typically catchable; mirror +6 for the Southern Hemisphere.
conservationStatus	cites-ii, no-retention, permit-required, vulnerable, or null.

Scope note. latRange and seasonMonths are deliberately conservative, application-oriented approximations for sport-fishing relevance — not authoritative biological range maps or spawning calendars.

Biological references

Species metadata is compiled with reference to publicly available biological databases: the FAO Species Catalogue, FishBase, and the IUCN Red List. This is a curated, application-oriented compilation and is not an official product of those organizations. It does not include WoRMS AphiaIDs or ICES species codes; entries are keyed by their own stable string id and binomial scientific name.

Contributing

Add a species common in your region, or aliases in your language, on GitHub: https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/fishing-species-catalog/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

License & citation

CC BY 4.0. Please credit FishRadar — https://fishradar.ai.

@misc{fishradar_species_catalog_2026,
  title  = {Fishing Species Catalog},
  author = {FishRadar},
  year   = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/fishing-species-catalog},
  note    = {https://fishradar.ai}
}