Taipower Opens 30-Year Marine Ecological Data to Aid Conservation and Policy

The Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Taiwan Biodiversity Information Alliance (TBIA) committee, officially launching a project to make more than thirty years of marine ecological monitoring data publicly available. The data originates from fixed-point observations conducted by Taipower since the 1970s around coastal power plants, offshore wind farms, and related maritime facilities, covering multiple indicators such as water quality, benthos, fish communities, and seasonal migrations. Previously, this information was largely kept internal, used solely for Taipower's independent management and environmental impact assessments. By opening it to the public through the TBIA platform, the data will provide invaluable foundational resources for academic research, policymaking, and public participation.

Marine ecological monitoring holds special significance in Taiwan. Surrounded by the sea on all sides, Taiwan boasts a coastline length ranking among the highest globally, rich marine biodiversity, and serves as a vital corridor for international fisheries and shipping. In recent years, issues such as rising ocean temperatures, acidification, and plastic pollution have become increasingly severe, prompting the government and civic organizations to successively promote marine conservation and sustainable use policies. As a key energy supplier, Taipower's marine monitoring data not only fills gaps in the government's marine observation network, but also helps evaluate the long-term impacts of energy facilities on the marine environment, providing more time-series-based empirical evidence for environmental impact assessments.

As Taiwan's integrated platform for biodiversity information, the TBIA has already aggregated databases from natural science research institutions, environmental groups, and local governments, forming an information ecosystem capable of cross-disciplinary retrieval and analysis. Once Taipower's data is uploaded, it will be integrated with existing data on fish distribution, coral reef health, and coastal erosion, thereby enhancing the spatiotemporal resolution and completeness of the data. Researchers can utilize these long-term sequence data to investigate trends in marine ecosystem changes, species adaptation mechanisms, and the disturbance effects of human activities. Simultaneously, policymakers can rely on more scientific evidence to adjust the designation of marine protected areas, fisheries management, and offshore wind power planning, balancing energy development with ecological sustainability.

From an industrial perspective, Taipower's release of marine monitoring data is also an important implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability reporting. Internationally, energy companies have frequently been forced to increase transparency due to environmental issues; Taipower's initiative not only responds to domestic and international expectations for environmental information disclosure, but also helps enhance corporate image and stakeholder trust. In the future, combining artificial intelligence and big data analysis technologies to transform these marine monitoring data into early warning models or resource management tools will create new value chains for Taipower in the fields of energy transition and marine sustainability.

In summary, the collaboration between Taipower and the TBIA is not merely data sharing, but a critical bridge fostering marine ecological conservation, supporting sustainable research, and strengthening public decision-making. By uploading over thirty years of long-term observation results to the TBIA platform, relevant agencies and the general public will be able to gain a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of changes in the marine environment, laying a solid foundation for Taiwan's marine resource management and biodiversity protection. If data types can continue to be expanded and data quality enhanced in the future, it is expected to establish a new model of marine sustainable governance built on science and bridged by information.