ECHOBASE—A Portable Geographic Fishery Research Database System

A geographic fishery research database system (GFRDBS), called ECHOBASE, for storing and management of data on pelagic fish resources from acoustic surveys and catch samples, combined with environmental data in a geographic context, has been developed. The system constitutes a portable and inexpensive yet powerful tool for fishery research and environmental monitoring and provides on‐board data processing and mapping capabilities. Data are acquired from an echosounder, echo signal processor, environmental profiler (CTD probe), and Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. The electronic digitized maps (based on C‐MAP public format files) provide active on‐screen nautical charts. The basic GFRDBS platform is a portable PC 486 machine, which is used as an on‐board data acquisition and processing tool running under MS Windows 3.1 operating environment. The system is designed around the Borland's PARADOX package, which provides a relational database for managing acoustic, catch, and environmental data. The EC...