As part of our “Cultural Landscapes-based Assessment” project, we conducted fieldwork in Edremit Bay, visiting fishing areas and engaging with small-scale fishers and stakeholders. Key concerns include the impacts of industrial fishing on biodiversity and the lack of localized fishing regulations. We aim to address these challenges through multi-actor conservation strategies.
Within the scope of our project titled “A Cultural Landscapes-based Assessment: Coexistence of Nature and Culture on the Aegean coast of Turkey” project, we were in the field on the Aegean coasts in the last week of March. For our first fieldwork, we travelled from south to north in the Edremit Bay, visiting important fishing areas such as Ayvalık, Burhaniye, Altınoluk, Küçükkuyu, Behram and Sivrice.
At each stop, we met with small-scale fishers of the region; through interviews, we obtained information on a wide range of topics from fishing techniques and gears to target species, from traditional knowledge to socio-economic and demographic structure. We conducted interviews on small-scale fisheries and biodiversity not only with fishers, but also with relevant public institutions, non-governmental organisations and academics in the region.
As a result of this fieldwork and previous research and expert meetings, our first impressions about the fisheries in Edremit Bay are as follows:
- Industrial fishing is one of the most pressing issues threatening the sustainability of small-scale fisheries in Turkey as in the rest of the country; it affects not only the socio-economic future of small-scale fishers but also the biodiversity of marine ecosystems.
- Fishing gears such as trawls and purse seines used in industrial fisheries cause massive quotas of fish and other marine species to be caught, thus increasing fishing pressure on species and reducing selectivity. Fishing gears operated by dredging severely destroy the bottom system, which is the food source of marine organisms.
- The lack of an effective monitoring system by the public sector leads to non-compliance with the fishing bans on the basis of species, size and fishing area.
- The fact that fishing bans are not regulated according to local context threatens the sustainability of the responsible small fishery model in different geographies. For example, in our seas with different sea water temperature and salinity, which are therefore habitats for different species, fishing bans in the same season or bans that do not consider the reproductive biology of species cause some fishing throughout the spawning period of species.
- The decrease in the food of marine mammals such as dolphin may cause a conflict between fishers and wildlife.
Our impressions after this field study once again show that in order to conserve wildlife and biodiversity as well as sustainable livelihoods and local economies, the root causes of the problems need to be understood and conservation strategies need to be addressed in a multi-actor and holistic process based on these root causes.
We will continue to deeply investigate small-scale fisheries on the Aegean coasts and continue our findings. The results of this research will inform the basis of our conservation prioritisation for the Aegean coasts.
Stay tuned for more upcoming activities!
On this page
