Dataset for projecting the effects of food web alterations and management policies on fish biomass and yield in Mynamar’s multispecies fishery
Description
The coastal and marine ecosystems of Myanmar have been subject to wide scale overexploitation and anthropogenic stress for decades. This has fundamentally altered their status and composition. These impacts have brought with them substantial impacts to fishing dependent communities and have put at risk the resilience of Myanmar’s marine socio-ecological systems. Unfortunately, data are lacking to be able to understand and illustrate the impact of these changes to local communities and fisheries managers. To fill this gap and to be able to populate a model that explores the effects that management could have for Myanmar’s multispecies fisheries, we assembled a unique database of life history information for over 600 species from fishery-independent surveys and FishBase data. The aim was to compile a comprehensive dataset that can be used in other studies and the list of species represents a catalogue developed from natural history texts dating from the 1800s as well as fishery independent surveys and online data. Additionally, we digitized the catch per hour fishing station data from the 2013 Nansen survey, which was used to calculate the swept area biomass of each species in Myanmar’s waters.