Chapter 23
A Historical Approach to Living Resources
on the Spanish Coasts from the Alboran Sea
Between the Sixteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
Juan Pérez-Rubín
23.1 Introduction
“Knowing the past is vital for developing a vision of the future. The oceans and
inshore seascapes of the world are rapidly changing, and understanding the human
and marine ecosystem forces, trajectories and responses —sometimes over centuries
or millennia— is vital for their informed management.” Priority actions needed
involve “tracing human interactions with marine ecosystems through deep time”
and moving towards a “unifying view of our oceans as networks of social-ecological
or coupled human-nature systems” (Ocean Past Initiative 2018).
In order to achieve these objectives, multidisciplinary research efforts have been
carried out internationally during the last decades, aimed at improving the knowledge and understanding of the interaction of marine environment between man from
the earliest of times and the historical variability in coastal and open sea ecology.
Several working groups or programmes such as “History of Marine Animal
Populations,” under the Census of Marine Life (Holm et al. 2010; Starkey et al.
2008); “Study Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries” (ICES 2011); “Marine
Environmental History” (Holm et al. 2001) and “Marine Historical Ecology” (Lotze
and McClenachan 2013) have contributed towards this goal.
Among other needs, the identification of ecosystem components and the recognition of the dynamics between the ecosystem and society are required, along with
an extensive review of the literature to identify sociocultural values related to local or
regional fisheries (Ignatius and Haapasaari 2018). The intense search for information
of the last centuries should include the multiple historical, scientific and technical
J. Pérez-Rubín (*)
Instituto Español de Oceanografía, Centro Oceanográfico de Málaga, Fuengirola (Málaga),
Spain
e-mail: jprubin@ieo.es
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
J. C. Báez et al. (eds.), Alboran Sea - Ecosystems and Marine Resources,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65516-7_23
775
A Historical Approach to Living Resources
on the Spanish Coasts from the Alboran Sea
Between the Sixteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
Juan Pérez-Rubín
23.1 Introduction
“Knowing the past is vital for developing a vision of the future. The oceans and
inshore seascapes of the world are rapidly changing, and understanding the human
and marine ecosystem forces, trajectories and responses —sometimes over centuries
or millennia— is vital for their informed management.” Priority actions needed
involve “tracing human interactions with marine ecosystems through deep time”
and moving towards a “unifying view of our oceans as networks of social-ecological
or coupled human-nature systems” (Ocean Past Initiative 2018).
In order to achieve these objectives, multidisciplinary research efforts have been
carried out internationally during the last decades, aimed at improving the knowledge and understanding of the interaction of marine environment between man from
the earliest of times and the historical variability in coastal and open sea ecology.
Several working groups or programmes such as “History of Marine Animal
Populations,” under the Census of Marine Life (Holm et al. 2010; Starkey et al.
2008); “Study Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries” (ICES 2011); “Marine
Environmental History” (Holm et al. 2001) and “Marine Historical Ecology” (Lotze
and McClenachan 2013) have contributed towards this goal.
Among other needs, the identification of ecosystem components and the recognition of the dynamics between the ecosystem and society are required, along with
an extensive review of the literature to identify sociocultural values related to local or
regional fisheries (Ignatius and Haapasaari 2018). The intense search for information
of the last centuries should include the multiple historical, scientific and technical
J. Pérez-Rubín (*)
Instituto Español de Oceanografía, Centro Oceanográfico de Málaga, Fuengirola (Málaga),
Spain
e-mail: jprubin@ieo.es
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
J. C. Báez et al. (eds.), Alboran Sea - Ecosystems and Marine Resources,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65516-7_23
775