IMIS

Bottom trawl fishery is one of the most important coastal fisheries in Taiwan both in production and economic values. However, its annual production started to decline due to overfishing since the 1980’s. Its bycatch problem also damages the fishery resources seriously. So, the government banned the bottom fishery within 3 nautical miles along the shoreline in 1989. To evaluate the effectiveness of this policy, a four year survey was conducted from 2000-2003, in the waters around Taiwan and the Pescadore Islands, one region each year respectively. Three to five different water depth fixed stations were chosen in each region for seasonal sampling. All fish specimens collected from trawling were brought back to lab for identification and measurement for their body length and weight. These raw data have been established in one database with the columns of species name, number of individual, total weight etc which could be browsed by choosing stations or seasons and sorted by their abundance of total weight. This data set contains 631 species and 3529 records of fishes which should be the most complete demersal fish fauna and their temporal and spatial distributional data on the soft marine habitat in Taiwan.