The rapid disappearance of species and dwindling of biodiversity on Earth is an important issue that will affect the sustainable existence of human beings and is a great challenge in this century. To explore the underlying mechanisms of community change and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation measures, long-term datasets of species abundance and diversity are particularly important.
To date, Taiwan’s investment in long-term ecological monitoring of fish communities has proven inadequate. The surveys and collected data are usually short-term, fragmented, incomplete, and improperly archived, resulting in a dearth of baseline ecological data. Perhaps the best example of a long-term marine ecological dataset is the survey of fish assemblages in the seas around the nuclear power plants of northern Taiwan, which contains over 30 years of monthly or seasonally gathered data. These data may reflect the community changes of surface and benthic fish in the local coastal subtropical zone1,2,3,4,5. Chen et al. described the long-term time series datasets of fish assemblages at nuclear power plants in northern Taiwan collected by impinged fish sampling at cooling water intake screens2, and collected by trammel net fish sampling and observed by an underwater diving visual census near thermal discharges3. Using these data, the same research team proposed an index of phylogenetic skew to describe the temporal variation of species composition of the assemblages over 25 years4, and analyzed the stochastic seasonality for the most abundant species, Diodon holocanthus, in northern Taiwan using monthly data over 11 years5. In Taiwan, the monitoring of projects concerning the ecological restoration of oil pollution, sewage pollution, cold damage, or cold-water intrusion usually only supplies short-term data. The investigation into the effects of sewage treatment near a power plant in Taipei using fixed fishing gill nets was conducted during a 12-year period6. In addition, the above mentioned studies were conducted in the sub-tidal zone, and there is no current long-term study of the fish assemblages in the intertidal zone in Taiwan. The intertidal zone suffers the highest impact of destructive anthropogenic influence and is the primary area of land-sea interaction.
Studies of fish communities in the intertidal zone have primarily been conducted in the reef coasts of the Northeast Pacific (particularly in North America) and western Europe, and there are few reports from tropical and subtropical areas7,8. Tidepools represent a unique ecosystem of rocky intertidal zones that provide a study site to investigate the variation in fish populations and community9. Many of these studies have investigated the temporal and spatial dynamics of community structures10,11,12,13,14, primarily in the context of the stability and resilience of communities7,15. Although reports of seasonal and annual changes in community structure have been published, relatively few of these studies are long-term surveys10,11,12,16,17,18.
In this study, we describe a long-term time series dataset of fish collected by counting the number of anesthetized fishes at sampling stations in rocky tidepools in the intertidal zone on the northern coast of Taiwan. Time series data provide a valuable resource for elucidating the long-term trends in fish community ecology and the intertidal ecosystem of this area. Additionally, these data provide the background information for the conservation and resilience of the fish community in coastal areas. These data can also be used by ecologists and fisheries biologists interested in understanding the temporal patterns of species abundance and composition in relation to environmental factors, climate change, and anthropogenic pressures.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
