Training Department, Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center
Abstract
Coastal waters of Southeast Asia are blessed with high productivity of fisheries resources because of rich ecosystems such as dense mangrove forests and sea grass beds, as well as extensive coral reefs with clean tropical sea environment. These areas are critical to a broad range of aquatic organisms during their life cycle from breeding, spawning, nursing and growing, hosting the feeding zones of aquatic species that are economically important, and serving as important source of recruitment of a wide diversity of fishery resources.
However, commercially important fishery resources in the region have declined due to many factors that include overfishing, illegal fishing, use of destructive fishing practices, and environmental degradation. The artificial reef has been the significant tool for fishing ground development and increasing fisheries production of the small scale fisheries. However, regarding the cost of artificial reef installation has high investment and managed by government agencies. Fishers only involve in the identification of fishing ground. The fishers' ownership on fishing ground could not be generated as well as management through community approaches has not been able to promote effectively.
One of the SEAFDEC’s missions is to seek for the appropriate tools to enhance coastal fishery resources together with awareness building on the community management as well as promoting a shifting of resources user to be resource manager through the installation of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) that costs cheaper investment than artificial reef. SEAFDEC has promoted the new design of Fish Enhancing Device (FEDs) since year 2009 and Thailand was reported as the first to introduce the use of FEDs. Until now, the utilization of FEDs in Thailand has widely spread throughout the coastal province of Thailand and is used in various designs.
In order to update the information on the structure and design of FEDs and to seek for the significant factors of FEDs construction and design that different between local and fishing ground. Thus, SEAFDEC/TD in cooperation with Department of Fisheries, Thailand conducte
