The World Fish Migration Day is a one day global-local event to create awareness on the importance of free-flowing rivers and migratory fish. The main goal is to improve understanding of the importance of migratory fish, the need for healthy rivers, the communities that depend on both, and the options we have to minimize or avoid impacts.
Wetlands International is supporter of the World Fish Migration Day. The construction of hard barriers across many of Europe’s rivers means that few rivers can claim to be genuinely free-flowing anymore. This has had serious implications for a number of migratory fish species such as eel and salmon. Through river restoration measures, the connectivity of rivers along their length must be improved. On World Fish Migration Day, we emphasise the need for the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of rivers.
Help us build support to conserve free-flowing rivers and unblock barriers to fish migration by joining an event near you!
Celebration at Palancia river (Castellon, Spain)
Our member CIREF, together with Ríos con Vida and AMBER, will celebrate the World Fish Migration Day at Palancia riverside (Castellon), a valuable river environment thanks to its indigenous flora and fauna. This river is being very seriously impacted by “La Fuente del Nano” barrier, among other issues. This dam creates an 8 km short out in the river channel. We look forward to the Júcar River Basin Authority to initiate actions to fix this issue as soon as possible.
The agenda of the event will include an introduction to problematic barriers and to the need of easing fish migration. It will be followed by a macroinvertebrates sampling and analysis workshop, including the usage of magnifying binocular glasses, an explanation of the importance of conservationist fishing, a water quality analysis and a ride on the riverside to view and debate about how important is to preserve riverside forests. The journey will finish with a visit to the exiting dam, including an explanation and a debate about potential solutions to its impact, and with the “BARRIERTRACKER” app presentation, designed by the EU AMBER Project. AMBER develops a barriers inventory for European rivers.
Click here for more details about this event.
Joint statement addressing blocked migration pathways
Our member the Sustainable Eel Group plans to team up many stakeholder groups from across Europe and beyond (NGOs, Angler’s Associations and others) and publish a Joint Statement that addresses the issue of blocked migration pathways.
Click here for more details about this event.