On Saturday in Fourni island, our crew dedicated the day to Local Ecological Knowledge and to results that can be achieved through long-term sincere collaboration founded on genuine respect for each place and its people.

Local Ecological Knowledge, the accumulated experiential knowledge that local communities hold about their natural environment,was only relatively recently described by the scientific community. Today, it is recognized internationally as an invaluable source of information. However, in Greece, it has been treated for decades with technocratic arrogance, and in our times, we risk losing it altogether.

For many years, the Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation has been documenting invaluable information drawn from the Local Ecological Knowledge of the island’s fishers and has used it for:

1. A) The protection of rare coralligenous ecosystems in the deep waters around Fourni. Long-term collaboration between fishers, the Municipality of Fourni, and Archipelagos led – for the first time in Greece – to the establishment of landmark legislation that prohibits trawling over an area of 430 km² surrounding the island complex.
2. B) The scientific publication on Local Ecological Knowledge in the international journal Ocean & Coastal Management. The study evaluated the mapping of Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows by fishers from five Aegean islands, compared with official maps from the Ministry of Agriculture. The results were striking: in some cases, the fishers’ accuracy reached up to 92%, while the official mapping was 0% accurate for the Fourni island complex.

The event was organized by the Municipality of Fourni Korseon and Blue Star Ferries, with the voluntary support of the Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation, the DIO Institute of Ecological Agriculture, and Procopiou Origins, together with the Fourni Fishers’ Association, the Association of Professionals of Fourni, and the Primary, Junior High, and High Schools of the island.

This series of events, bringing together students, teachers, and local residents, served both as a review of the work accomplished and as a foundation for discussion and future collaborations.