Alboran Sea - Ecosystems and Marine Resources

The Alboran Sea and Its Significance

The Alboran Sea represents a regional Mediterranean space where North and South worlds merge, creating a geopolitical region where marine resources and maritime activities should be managed from a national and international perspective. It is widely known that currently the planet is suffering a global change, and it is also affecting the Alboran Sea, its ecosystems, and populations.

Understanding the Region

An important first step to update a paramount vision on this region is to understand the climatic, geologic, and oceanographic, including biochemical cycles, processes which shape the rich geodiversity, biodiversity, the productivity, and the sustainable use of the marine resources from Alboran Sea.

Fisheries Management and Environmental Variability

The fisheries management system should take into account marine environmental variability to achieve biological sustainability of marine resources. Well-funded policy-makers’ decisions require a sound science-based knowledge of the interaction between the marine environment and commercial stocks. This is because the role of marine environment in the evolution of fish stocks is sometimes even more important than the one played by fishers in the commercial exploitation of them. Finally, we should analyze the different aspects of political context that could affect the management of the resources from Alboran Sea in the context of climate change.

Book Overview

This book reviews different aspects of the Alboran Sea to help understand the current situation from the original Tethys Ocean.

The book is divided into four blocks: (i) Oceanographic, geological and ecological context (chapters 2 to 7), (ii) biodiversity and ecosystems distribution (chapters 8 to 12), (iii) fisheries resources and aquaculture (chapters 13 to 20), and (iv) conservation, management and marine policies (chapters 21 to 25).