FishNet is a collaborative effort by natural history museums and other biodiversity institutions to establish a global network of Ichthyology collections. There is an open invitation for any institution with a fish collection to join.

The current portal is an outgrowth of the original FishNet project with improvements in network stability, georeferencing capabilities, and technical support. Users are provided access to searchable, mappable and downloadable data that are cached on a regular basis from participating institutions who have published their data via the DiGIR or TAPIR protocols with a Darwin Core schema.

FishNet is also one of four (along with MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS) vertebrate network portals that provide access to specimen collection records from around the world. These web portals, together, comprise VertNet and serve georeferenced, taxon-based data from 72 global institutions.

VertNet is a cooperative project working to maintain and expand these distributed database projects. Future plans for VertNet include biodiversity informatics workshops, enhancement of the portal design, better searching capabilities, and a dynamic cache to expand performance and analytic features.