Biodiversity, Coastal Protection, Promotion and Applicability Investigation of the Ocean Health Index for Turkish Seas

• Main Author: Cem Gazioğlu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IJEGEO 2018-12-01
• Series: International Journal of Environment and Geoinformatics
• Subjects: Ocean Health Index (OHI); Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM); scale; score.
• Online Access: http://dergipark.gov.tr/ijegeo/issue/39624/484067

We are witnessing a process that involves environmental problems at the global scale, primarily climate change, which will require all people to be concerned about the health of the oceans. The health of the marine environment and ecology is deteriorating. Declining biodiversity and changing chemical transformations due to this deterioration reduce the capacity of natural processes to reproduce healthy marine environments. Scientists who work on a global scale believe that the processes of change have reached the level we cannot expect to take action and believe that we must prioritize our action to reverse the trend. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop a multi-dimensional scale that can measure not only the science parameters but also socio-economic scaling for measuring the health of the seas-oceans. There are sources describing an acceptable definition of a healthy ocean as the continuation of benefits for humanity (Rapport, et al., 1998; Samhouri, et al., 2011). Multidimensional management and conservation of marine resources can be explained by a derivative of human activities and needs deep analysis (Halpern, et al., 2008). Numerous efforts to quantify natural resources in a comparative form have been the subject of research for many years. Numerous quantities expressed together with graphical visualization, as well as having different approaches to what it means to be in the digital form, are more than an ideal, but a challenge. To better understand and monitor ecosystem conditions; there is a need for a standardized and scalable index that is understandable and usable. In addition, the developments of international organizations and cooperation for the purpose of protecting the coasts and the increase of their activities have revealed the need for a common indexation in determining the status of the coasts and seas. The primary objective of the index in question is to ensure the continuation of the benefits that are used more than the rating of the severity of the deterioration. The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a good reference to quantitatively assess the status of the marine environment from the perspective of coupled human-ocean systems (Elfes et al., 2014; Lam & Roy, 2014; Halpern et al., 2014; Daigle et al., 2016; Longo et al., 2017). The OHI is a novel indicator approach to assess the health of the oceans through tracking the current and likely future status of ten widely-held public goals (Halpern et al., 2012). In this study, biodiversity, development of coastal protection indices is explained. The introduction of the ocean health index in the Turkish seas and its applicability is being investigated.