Around 10,000 square meters of wetland have dried in Turkish Lakes Region in five decades due to pollution and the overuse of water, an expert of the Society of the Protection of Turkish Nature (TTKD) has said.
“The Turkish Lakeland had some 17,000 square meters of wetlands in the 1960s. Now the region is maximum 5,000 square meters in size in the summers,” Erol Kesici, a key scientific consultant of RRKD, told Demirören News Agency, adding that more than one third of the region has dried.
The Lakes Region is an area with a series of tectonic lakes within the folds of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey’s southwest.
The Lakeland is located between the provinces of Burdur, Isparta, Antalya, Denizli, Afyonkarahisar and Konya.
With a report he wrote for “World Wetlands Day, Feb. 2,” Kesici stressed, “We are losing the lakes at this geographical location which once hosted the world’s biggest wetlands.”
According to the expert, many of these lands in the region have also been dried purposely as they housed mosquitos and frogs and were “marshy lands.”
“All these lands dried due to different reasons and were indeed sources of natural life and the ecological balance,” he remarked.
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