This project, Taiwanese Shellfish Digital Archives, is one of the projects of Taiwanese Fauna Archives under the National Digital Archives Program. Taiwan holds rich resources of shellfish, for the island is located in the Indo-Pacific Region where there are the widest distribution and variety of shellfish in the world. However, Taiwan's shellfish is declining rapidly in both quantity and variety because of the growing pressure of population, the advance of industrial activities, the continuing enlargement of pollution area, the destruction of habitat by earthquake and other natural disasters, etc. There is therefore a need to establish a Taiwanese shellfish digital database before it is too late.

This project will be based on the Taiwanese shellfish database established by the project director on the Academia Sinica website (http://shell.sinica.edu.tw) plus the results of the director's near 20 years’ work on shellfish such as her/his collection, journal articles and monographs, literature reviews and specimen collection. It is hoped that with this middle to long-term project we will establish digital archives of about 1,500 to 2,000 species of Taiwanese shellfish about which we already have sufficient knowledge. Information included in this digital archive will be classified into the following fields: English and Chinese scientific name, place of origin, distribution, physical feature, reference, shellfish vita (habitat, resource and similar information), source and features of specimen, specimen image, remark, etc. We believe that this digital archive is significant contribution to the teaching, research and promotion of Taiwan's indigenous species, resource management, and national land use and wildlife conservation not only for the time being but also for the future.

http://shell.sinica.edu.tw/