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| Title | Monitoring of fish in zone of artificial reefs |
| Author | Jaume Rucabado, Arturo Castellon, Janusz Burczynski, Jorge Alcazar & Lech Piekutowski |
| Date | Dec-01-1994 |
| Description | On the northern coast of Spain, there are a number of fish nursery areas, which overlap with local fishing grounds. Artificial reefs were constructed in these areas in order to create protected zones or refuge, for demersal reef fishes and other aquatic organisms. These artificial reefs created new areas of habitat, which aquatic managers were interested in monitoring to determine the potential advantages of these protected reserves. Acoustic surveys were conducted in 1993 and in 1994 with the following objectives: to evaluate acoustic methods and technology, as a rapid and effective tool for the monitoring of protected and unprotected zones and to provide a comparison of fish spatial distribution and density (biomass), and fish size in protected and unprotected areas. Protected and unprotected areas of similar bathymetric features and bottom substrate were selected for the comparison studies. Mobile surveys were then conducted in both areas from a small boat using a BioSonics 120 kHz, dual-beam echosounder and transducer to acquire the acoustic data. The echo integration technique was used to provide estimates of fish biomass. Target strength estimates, or the "acoustic fish size" were used to scale the integrator and to provide a distribution of fish size. The acoustic data were acquired simultaneously with GPS data, in order to allocate reports (density estimates) along each transect. |
| Doc | artificial_reef.pdf |
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