Korhan has attended IAS & TUBA Biodiversity Webinar as a speaker with his presentation titled Anatolian Aquatic Biodiversity in the Face of Climate Change and Intensifying Anthropogenic Pressures. Thank you for this organization to IAS & TUBA.
You can watch the webinar on the Islamic World Academy of Sciences YouTube Channel:
The latest article by the saline lakes team “Decadal changes in size, salinity, waterbirds, and fish in lakes of the Konya Closed Basin, Turkey, associated with climate change and increasing water abstraction for agriculture” is now available online and will be published in the “Temporary Ponds and Shallow Lakes under Global Change” special issue of The Inland Waters. The paper gives a comprehensive account of the dramatic changes, which are mainly driven by the land-use and climate change, the largest endorheic basin of Turkey has been undergoing since the last 40 years in terms of salinization and size reduction of the lakes, decline of groundwater level and changes in waterbird and fish fauna. The article also includes modelling projections using various climate and land use scenarios which predict serious additional reductions of the water level in the future due to climate change, leading to deterioration (or complete loss) of lake ecosystems.
Our team encountered an unprecedented loss of lakes in Anatolia during the expedition for the saline lakes project. Mustafa from our team gave interviews for national press about our fieldwork on saline lakes ecosytems and specifically on Acıgöl which was seriously affected by the drought.
Click here for the NTV interview. (In Turkish)
Click here for the TRT News interview. (In Turkish)
Click here for the Hurriyet interview. (In Turkish)
We are so happy to announce that a new book which is pioneer in the birds literature in Turkey has recently published and Korhan is one of the contributing authors. This book is the first bird identification guide for the birds of Turkey and hopefully, It would help amateur and professional birdwatchers. You can buy it from here.
Tekin, Serhat and Mustafa from our team are at an expedition in Konya North Basin for Saline Lakes Project with our collaborators METU Limnology Group, lead by Erik Jeppesen, Meryem Beklioğlu, Korhan Özkan and Zuhal Akyürek are head of this project.
The aim of the study is a novel understanding of the structure and functioning of different types of saline/brackish lake ecosystems and their response to key stressors (warming, abstraction and external nutrient loading).
Click here for more information about Saline Lakes Project.
Korhan will be giving a talk on the expeditions to extereme enviroments for ecological research on this saturday. You can attend the event with he link below:
Zoom linki: https://istanbul-edu-tr.zoom.us/j/93788873062?pwd=TEhsc3daN2xiMWdLZDhsaUZ4NnVtUT09
Meeting ID: 937 8887 3062
Passcode: 846156
We joined the summer school which was conducted by Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Society (EkoEvoDer). Korhan Özkan gave a lecture about major concepts in ecology which were related to community ecology, species environment relationships, species-species interactions. The seminars are going on till the evening of April 28. We are happy to be a part of this great organization. You can watch the lectures on EkoEvoDer YouTube Channel.
Our project titled “Understanding the complex interaction of salinization and eutrophication on Green House Gas emissions of Anatolian inland waters” has been funded by METU. We will be compiling a basin-wide bottom up inventory of GHG flux from Anatolian saline lakes, and investigating complex relationship between biogenic GHG release, eutrophication and salinization, which involves positive- and negative- feedback loops and non-linear interactions. We are happy to collaborate with Meryem Beklioğlu @METU, Thomas Davidson and Joachim Audet @ Aarhus University (Denmark), and Pelin Ertürk Arı, Akif Arı and Nusret Karakaya @Abant Izzet Baysal University.
We carried out our first field study to test our GHG sampling strategy in April 16, in Akgöl, Göksu Estuary.
Tekin presented our recent work on Konya Closed Basin, which has been facing dramatic water loss, in the Shallow Lakes Conference, 2021. Our study describes the decadal changes in size and salinity of lakes, and also dramatic decline of waterbirds and fish abundance and species richnes in lakes in the Konya Closed Basin, Turkey, which are mainly associated with climate change and increasing water abstraction for agriculture. The study is a joint effort of our Saline Lakes project team along with many other contributors and describes the critical changes the basin has undergone on the recent years.
Fou our presentation:
