Fish species inventory of Yasuní National Park, Ecuador

Despite limited access and rather deficient sampling in many lowland areas of eastern Ecuador, scientists have been able to demonstrate that this specific region of Amazonia houses extraordinarily high concentrations of species within several taxa – terrestrial and aquatic, plant and animal, vertebrate and invertebrate.
In this work, we developed an updated list of the ichthyofauna of the Yasuní National Park (YNP) based on an extensive literature review and databases of the most representative ichthyological collections from Ecuador. Our results yielded 457 species of freshwater fishes distributed in 45 families and 13 orders. This number substantially exceeded previous fish lists from YNP and accounts for a considerable proportion of species inhabiting the Napo River basin as well as the entire Amazon River basin.
The occurrence of far more species within this limited geographic space than have been previously reported, the services these species provide to humans, and the absence of ..., To compile a list of fish species occurring in the YNP, an updated database of species present in YNP was developed from previous lists of fish species known from the Napo Basin of Ecuador and Peru (Barriga 2012, Sanchez et al. 2013, Jézéquel et al. 2020). Later, this database was curated based on records occurring within and around the boundaries of YNP. All fish records, old and new, were validated by databases of the two major ichthyological collections in Ecuadorian museums: Museo de Historia Natural Gustavo Orcés – Escuela Politécnica Nacional (MEPN) and Colección Ictiológica del Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, Quito, Ecuador (MECN-DP). These records are the product of decades of expeditions to the Ecuadorian Amazon and curatorial activities of each museum. In addition, digital databases of fishes collections from the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) and National Museum of Natural Hitory (USNM), have been verified for records of several species absent in MEPN or MECN-DP...., , # Fish species inventory of Yasuní National Park, Ecuador

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgnn](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgnn)

**Description of the data and file structure**

The supplementary materials are divided into two files, resulting from a study on fish diversity.

The **first** file, titled **Checklist_Taxon_Template**, is a large dataset containing a list of fish species present in Yasuní National Park (YNP). This file follows the format required by the journal **Biodiversity Data Journal**, where each row represents a species, and columns contain qualifiers (e.g., occurrence IDs from Ecuadorian collections, locality, coordinates, collection date, collectors, and more) needed for data validation and table formatting. It is important to note that for each species, the **voucher number** is indicated in the \"catalogNumber\" column, while the **museum code** where the voucher is stored is specified in the \"collectionCode\" column, located toward the right end of the...