With the changing of climate and the growing of marine environmental pollutions in recent years, many countries have devoted to establishing their database for marine environment and aquatic living resources.However, in the past, marine research programs in Taiwan were mostly confined to a short time scale and of a limited region. Besides,transects or stations of surveys were usually changing with the changing of projects, resulted in a scarcity of long term and systematic observations of waters around Taiwan. Furthermore, most programs were aimed at marine chemistry and physics studies. It is hard for fishery
scientists to incorporate that information into fishery stock assessment.As a result, Fisheries Research Institute implemented「Taiwan Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, TaiCOFI」program to conduct quarterly cruises to collect water temperature, salinity, nutrients, chlorophyll-a and zooplankton measurements at 62 stations in the surrounding waters of Taiwan. Through this thorough investigation, we try to understand thecoupling of physical, chemical and biological dynamics in the surrounding waters of Taiwan to figure out the factors associated with the fluctuation of fishery resources.