Aaike De Wever,^* Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber,^** Mark O. Gessner,^*** Klement Tockner<sup>****


*</sup>Aaike De Wever (aaike.dewever@naturalsciences.be) is a biologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, in Brussels, Belgium. He is a scientific data manager for BioFresh, a large integrative European project on freshwater biodiversity.
^**Astrid Schmidt-Kloiber is a landscape ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria. She is a river ecologist with expertise in database design and set-up and in the management of Web-based databases.
^***Mark O. Gessner is department head at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, in Stechlin, Germany, and a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology, in Germany. He is a freshwater ecologist with special interest in ecosystem functioning and its relation to global change and biodiversity.
^****Klement Tockner is director of the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, in Berlin, and a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, in Germany. He is a freshwater biodiversity expert.