Abstract:As one of the most important inshore fishery waters, the Beibu Gulf, is attracting increasing attention with regard to the density of fishery resources and resource changes. The fishery acoustic technology is increasingly being applied for fishery resource assessment, because of its advantages such as rapid, continuous, greater sampling rate, and rich spatio-temporal data. Nonetheless, this technology is influenced by some factors such as weather, sea conditions, and survey route; hence, the echo data is unreliable. In order to overcome the possible defects that exist in the sampling process, and to obtain a more reasonable density distribution of fishery resources, we combined the spatial interpolation methods with the fishery acoustic technology. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the Beibu Gulf fishery acoustic survey data obtained during July to August of 2014 by using Echoview (a fishery acoustic survey data processing system, Version 6.1). Next, Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW), Ordinary Kriging (OK), and Simple Kriging (SK) were applied to analyze the actual data after logarithmic transformation of the practical detection data, in order to obtain normally distributed data. By calculating and comparing the determination coefficients (), mean error (ME), and root mean square error (RMSE) of the three interpolation models (IDW, OK, and SK), we selected the optimal interpolation model fitting the fishery acoustic survey on the Beibu Gulf. The results showed that the distribution of fish density was relatively uniform, which indicated relatively less concentrated distribution in the survey area. Further, fish were mainly concentrated in the mideast coastal area and the midwestern region of the common fishing zone. In contrast, the distribution of fish in the south-central offshore waters was rare. By comparing the three interpolation parameters, we found that and RMSE showed a good precedence similarity in the following order:OK > SK > IDW. In contrast, ME showed the order of OK > IDW > SK. Our findings suggest that OK could be a better predictor of resource density distribution of the Beibu Gulf waters for the evaluation of fishery acoustic resource density of the area and is useful for potential application in the combination analysis of fishery acoustic technology and spatial interpolation.