The Minister of Ecological Transition, Mireia Mollà, presented this morning in Dénia the launch of the Marine Surveillance Service to protect the Posidonia meadows. The service has eight boats, six itinerant and two with fixed headquarters, and a team of eighteen people, who make up this proximity network that supports, from the sea, the fulfillment and dissemination of the Decree for the protection and recovery of these marine forests in the entire Valencian arch. Dénia, together with the city of Valencia, will be the permanent headquarters of a service vessel, which will operate on the Dianense coast until November 30. In the itinerant bases, surveillance will be carried out for three months.
The Dénia Sea Museum has hosted the presentation of this pioneering surveillance network in an act in which the regional secretary, Paula Tuzón, the mayor of Dénia, also participated. Vicent Grimalt, and which was attended by several mayors of the base municipalities of this service.
Mollà has indicated that the objective of the marine surveillance network, one of the first on a state scale, is to reconcile activity and conservation in 65.000 hectares of maritime surface of the Valencian Community.
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On board a boat, the head of the autonomous department together with Tuzón and Grimalt, have followed the work of the Surveillance Service, whose mission is to inventory the distribution of activities at sea, improve information on species and habitats, as well as inform users who are located in protected areas of conservation regulations. In this first operation, the staff has transferred the obligations and recommendations to other fishing boats and sailboats to ensure the null impact of the uses on posidonia.
Alcalà de Xivert and Orpesa (in Castellón), Valencia and the Alicante municipalities of Alacant, Calp, Dénia, Xàbia and Torrevieja are the headquarters of the service, which has an investment of half a million euros and is proposed as a space for environmental protection open to entities and administrations in their conservation work.
"The teams are going to tell people what is happening under the sea and together they will create a network to love posidonia, to protect it and to fight together for biodiversity and against climate change", Mollà pointed out.
The importance of posidonia meadows
For its part, Tuzón has highlighted that the Decree for the protection and recovery of Posidonia forests, approved on May 20, highlights the ecological role of meadows as a source of oxygenation, large CO2 collectors, a shelter for biodiversity and a barrier natural vs. regression beaches.
The regional secretary has referred to the knowledge and regulation to preserve the second largest extension of posidonia in the western Mediterranean. "It is a priority to know the state of the meadows on our coasts. We want to reconcile and establish a framework that avoids the impact of the projected infrastructures on posidonia." For this reason, this year the mapping of the Posidonia meadows of the Valencian coast will be updated, information that will later be made available to users through an App.
"Protect and raise awareness"
The mayor of Dénia, for his part, has pointed out the importance for the municipality of hosting the presentation of this pioneering service in the Valencian Community "because we are now immersed in different processes and projects that have this double objective in common: to protect the meadows of Posidonia and raise awareness among the public and the tourism that visits us". In this regard, he referred to the 'Viu la posidònia' project in which the towns of Ibiza, Cambrils and Dénia are collaborating: "For this reason, closing this week with the presentation of the Surveillance Service allows us to make even more visible the work that we are doing".
The idea is not bad I think, but that the presentation is made in the "Museo del Mar" when there is no information at all about animals, fish, crustaceans, algae or Posidonia in said museum is ridiculous. First, that the City Council itself be aware that the sea is the living part, without it, we would not be here.
Making a Museum of the Sea with human-made things found underwater is like making a Museum of the Forest with things found in car accidents from a century ago, or broken vases from Roman times, but we say nothing about the Forest, the trees, of the animals…. Pseudocult arrogance.
Occurrences. Which cost a lot of money.
This has been done for ten years by a similar government in the Balearic Islands. How much poseidonia has grown? Zero . They put buoys and fines where people anchored and put a lot of other officials. Fines and collection of buoys. In the natural park of the marine reserve nobody anchors and there are no boats going around and polluting. That they mark the zones and stop frivolously indebting us.
Totally agree. That money could be invested in cleaning and beach safety. Abandoned they are.