This study was conducted to select target fish species as baseline research for accumulation analysis of major hazardous chemicals entering the aquatic ecosystem in Korea and to analyze the impact on fish community. The test bed was selected from a sewage treatment plant, which could directly confirm the impact of the inflow of harmful chemicals, and the Geum River estuary where harmful chemicals introduced into the water system were concentrated. A multivariable metric model was developed to select target candidate fish species for hazardous chemical analysis. Details consisted of seven metrics: (1) commercially useful metric, (2) top-carnivorous species metric, (3) pollution fish indicator metric, (4) tolerance fish metric, (5) common abundant metric, (6) sampling availability (collectability) metric, and (7) widely distributed fish metric. Based on seven metric models for candidate fish species, eight species were selected as target candidates. The co-occurring dominant fish with target candidates was tolerant (50%), indicating that the highest abundance of tolerant species could be used as a water pollution indicator. A multi-metric fish-based model analysis for aquatic ecosystem health evaluation showed that the ecosystem health was diagnosed as “bad conditions”. Physicochemical water quality variables also influenced fish feeding and tolerance guild in the testbed. Eight water quality parameters appeared high at the T1 site, indicating a large impact of discharging water from the sewage treatment plant. T2 site showed massive algal bloom, with chlorophyll concentration about 15 times higher compared to the reference site.

Acoustic target strength (TS) of 12 commercially important fish species caught in the Korean waters had been investigated and their results were presented. Laboratory measurements of target strength on 12 dominant fish species were carried out at a frequencies of 75 kHz by single beam method under the controlled condition of the water tank with the 241 samples of dead and live fishes. The target strength pattern on individual fish of each species was measured as a function of tilt angle, ranging from -45˚ (head down aspect) to 45˚ (head up aspect) in 0.2˚ intervals, and the averaged target strength was estimated by assuming the tilt angle distribution as N (-5.0˚, 15.0˚). The 75 to fish length relationship for each species was independently derived by a least - squares fitting procedure. Also, a linear regression analysis for all species was performed to reduce the data to a set of empirical equations showing the variation of target strength to fish length and fish species. An empirical model for fish target strength(TS, dB) averaged over the dorsal aspect of 158 fishes of 7 species and which spans the fish length(L, m) to wavelength(λ, m) ratio between 6.2 and 21.3 was derived: TS: 27.03 Log(L)-7.7Log(λ)-17.21, (r2=0.59).