Abstract
In addition to its main coast on the Mediterranean Sea, Israel has the very short coast on Red Sea, in the northern, inner part of the Gulf of Aqaba. The fisheries catch taken within the small Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of Israel, in the Gulf of Aqaba is presented, based on catch estimates reconstructed from a variety of published papers, government and non-government sources for the years 1950–2010, and compared with the catch it reports annually to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The different sectors of the fisheries are treated separately and the composition of the catches estimated. Israel’s total catch in its Red Sea EEZ was less than 100 t · year−1 in the early 1950s, increased until it reached its peak of around 300 t · year−1 in the early 1980s, then decreased abruptly (when Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt and left the Sinai Peninsula) to around 100 t · year−1 in the late 2000s. Overall, the estimated reconstructed catch of Israel from 1950 to 2010 was 1.4 times what is reported in the FAO database after accounting for the fact that, from 1957 to the early 1970s, and Israeli vessels operated in Eritrean waters, but pooled their landing with those from the Israeli EEZ. This catch reconstruction with explicitly stated procedures and assumptions, accounting all the sectors comprehensively, should serve as a starting point to improve the quality of the data and for better management of resources.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Dori Edelist from the University of Haifa for providing insights and data for the Israeli fishery in the Gulf of Aqaba and reviewing the chapter, which was enriched by his comments. We also thank Dr. James Shapiro for supplying data on Israel ’s fisheries. This is a contribution of Sea Around Us , a scientific collaboration between the University of British Columbia and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Tesfamichael, D., Govender, R., Pauly, D. (2016). Israel. In: Tesfamichael, D., Pauly, D. (eds) The Red Sea Ecosystem and Fisheries. Coral Reefs of the World, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7435-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7435-2_8
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