FreshwaterLife Identification Guides

FreshwaterLife is an initiative of the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA). For the past 70 years the FBA has been producing keys to freshwater organisms in book form. FreshwaterLife aims to build on the acknowledged expertise of the FBA by presenting existing keys in new ways and producing new electronic tools to assist identification.

We have developed an online key-player which works in the majority of modern web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, and which allows you to move interactively through the identification process on the web. We will shortly be publishing a number of keys aimed at a variety of audiences in this way. See example fish key below.

A key to the freshwater fish families of Britain and Ireland - (Opens in a new Window)

This key to fish families is based on Freshwater Biological Association Scientific Publication 62, "Keys to the Freshwater Fish of Britain and Ireland, with notes on their distribution and ecology" by Peter S. Maitland. The key includes species fact sheets to the 23 fish families, links to other parts of the FreshwaterLife site and a slide show of images.

We also have full-text keys catalogued in our Information Portal which will be made available on these pages as soon as we are able.