Abstract
The long-term species diversity patterns in marine fish communities are garnering increasing attention from ecologists and conservation biologists. However, current databases on quantitative abundance information lack consistent long-term time series, which are particularly important in exploring the possible underlying mechanism of community changes and evaluating the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation measures. Here we describe an impinged fish assemblage dataset containing 1, 283, 707 individuals from 439 taxa. Once a month over 19 years (1987–1990 and 2000–2014), we systematically collected the fish killed by impingement upon cooling water intake screens at two nuclear power plants on the northern coast of Taiwan. Because impingement surveys have low sampling errors and can be carried out over many years, they serve as an ideal sampling tool for monitoring how fish diversity and community structure vary over an extended period of time.
Highlights
Background & SummaryMonitoring long-term species diversity patterns in marine fish communities is receiving increasing attention from ecologists and other researchers[1,2,3]
The original purpose of the investigation was to estimate fishery loss due to cooling water intakes which inevitably impinge fish and marine organisms, but the experiment is an efficient and economical way to study local fish community structure, especially the pelagic or non-reef associated species which are rarely observed by divers and the non-commercial species which are usually not targeted by traditional fishing methods
The impinged fish community data were collected from the 1st Nuclear Power Plant at Shihmen (25° 17′ 9′′ N, 121° 35′ 10′′ E) and the 2nd Nuclear Power Plant at Yehliu (25° 12′ 10′′ N, 121° 39′ 45′′ E) which is about 17 km apart eastward from the 1st
Summary
Monitoring long-term species diversity patterns in marine fish communities is receiving increasing attention from ecologists and other researchers[1,2,3]. These data have been used to study the temporal and spatial variation of fish community structures[11,12]. These data can be used by fishery biologists and ecologists who are interested in depicting and understanding the seasonal pattern of species abundance and composition in relation to anthropogenic pressures, environmental factors, climate change, and trophic interactions Because these data are collected monthly, they can be used to assess the effect of different sampling scale in community for ecological monitoring
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