About Aquatic-Art

Aquatic-Art is an aquarium encyclopedia and toolkit built and maintained by a single developer passionate about planted aquariums and freshwater fishkeeping. The site combines reference data on hundreds of freshwater fish, aquatic plants, and aquarium equipment with original interactive tools — compatibility checking, stocking calculators, CO₂ / lighting assessment, tank volume estimation, and more.

Every species page, equipment listing, and tool is designed to help aquarists make informed decisions about their tanks. The site is a living project — data is continuously reviewed, corrected, and expanded as new information becomes available.

Methodology

Data on Aquatic-Art is assembled through a multi-stage pipeline:

1. Aggregation — Information is collected from established reference databases and expert-curated sources (see Data sources below).
2. Merging & cross-referencing — Multiple sources are compared; conflicts are resolved by preferring the most authoritative or most recent source.
3. LLM-assisted enrichment — Descriptive text (care guides, behaviour notes, planting tips) is drafted by a language model using the aggregated specs as context. The model is explicitly instructed never to invent numeric values.
4. Validation & review — All enriched data passes automated validation (taxonomy checks, unit sanity, cross-species compatibility rules) before being staged for human review.
5. Graduation — Entries that meet minimum quality thresholds (≥150 words of original text, verified sources, confidence ≥ 0.7) are flagged as “graduated” and made publicly indexable. Entries below this threshold are not indexed by search engines until they improve.

The interactive tools (compatibility checker, stocking calculators, CO₂ / lighting assessment, tank volume estimator, and others) are built from first-principles aquarium science and are independently tested.

Data sources

Aquatic-Art aggregates data from the following authoritative sources:

• FishBase — Comprehensive species database. Data used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
• Wikidata — Structured taxonomic and descriptive data. Used under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain dedication.
• Seriously Fish — Expert-curated freshwater species profiles with detailed husbandry and ecological information.
• Flowgrow — Aquatic plant database with care parameters and growth characteristics.
• Equipment manufacturer specifications — Verified product specs (wattage, flow rate, tank capacity, dimensions) for aquarium equipment.
• Peer-reviewed literature — Water chemistry, nitrogen cycle, and biological filtration parameters drawn from published aquarium science.

Where data conflicts between sources, priority is given to the most authoritative, specific, or recently updated source. All merged data is attributed in the site’s issue tracking system for full traceability.

Confidence & verification

Every data point on Aquatic-Art carries a confidence score between 0 and 1:

• 1.0 — Verified against manufacturer specs or authoritative reference databases (FishBase, peer-reviewed sources).
• 0.7–0.9 — Aggregated from multiple reputable sources with high agreement.
• 0.5–0.7 — Single reputable source, or LLM-generated description text that has passed automated validation.
• < 0.5 — Auto-generated or unverified data pending human review.

Entries with a confidence score below 0.7 and fewer than 150 words of human-reviewed content are automatically marked as not indexable by search engines. They remain accessible to users who navigate directly but will not appear in search results until their quality improves.

This quality gate is a deliberate design choice: we prefer to show up for fewer queries with genuinely useful pages rather than index thin, auto-generated content.

Corrections & feedback

Aquarium knowledge evolves, and mistakes happen. If you spot an error, an omission, or data that is out of date, please let us know:

• Use the feedback widget available on every page (the “Report an issue” button) to submit a correction inline.
• Email hello@aquatic-art.com with details and supporting references.

All reported issues are tracked in our internal queue and reviewed as part of the daily enrichment workflow. Verified corrections are deployed promptly.