Evaluating marine areas of Turkey through the perspective of ecosystem based marine spatial planning

Marine environment today is globally under grave pressure originating from human activities. Marine ecosystems' health continues to decline due to increasing human activities fuelled by technological progress and industrialization at sea despite the efforts to improve environmental conditions and adopted international initiatives to protect it. Nevertheless, demand for natural resources rises alongside the global population growth. Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) as an ecosystem-based integrated management approach in which human activities are analyzed and allocated spatially and temporally to achieve ecological, economic and social objectives were adopted in order to manage the increasing pressures on marine environment and achieve socio-economic objectives. Turkey is a peninsular country that has access to significant marine areas. These have different features in terms of diversity and intensity of economic activities; vulnerability of ecosystems; natural resources and political situation with regard to maritime jurisdiction. After analyzing the scale, intensity, socio-economic significance and interactions within these activities conducted in the waters under Turkish national jurisdiction with the help of views of the experts on marine sciences, the West Black Sea, Marmara Sea and Aegean Sea regions revealed potential benefits in terms of integrated management. Among these regions, Aegean Sea stands out in terms of (a) impacts of diverse sea uses on ecosystem health, (b) dependency of the sea uses on the ecosystem's health, (c) scarcity of sea area which holds important potential for a wide array of activities, (d) potentials of important conflicts and synergies among actual and potential activities in the marine area and (e) significant wind energy potential, thus making it very suitable for MSP in line with national and regional environment and socio-economic objectives. Keywords: Marine spatial planning, Ecosystem-based management, Sustainability, Natural resources management, Environment management.