Marine biodiversity in Southeast Asian and adjacent seas

Assembling a comprehensive list of the biodiversity occurring along the coast of a major country such as China requires a huge amount of work, ranging from identifying and locating compilations of species accounts and validating the species names and identifications they contain, to creating databases that organize this information and make it accessible to a wide range of users. Global online databases exist, in the form of FishBase and SeaLifeBase, which can be used to make marine biodiversity information available for all maritime countries of the world, and which already contain a huge amount of data, including on China. However, most of data sources used for that country are non-Chinese, which may lead to the impression that these databases were designed with non-Chinese sources in mind. This is not the case, and to correct this impression, we have assembled an overview of the marine biodiversity of China based mainly on Chinese sources.