Conservation and management issues of Prespa National Park

Abstract

The present article describes the human activities in the area and their changes and trends, given that the contemporary nature conservation key issues are closely related to past and present socio-economic and cultural conditions, both within Prespa itself and outside of it. The liberation of Prespa, a remote and rather socially isolated borderline area, from Ottoman occupation took place in 1912–13. Recent events in its environmental history have been forest clearings and human depopulation in the Civil War (1944–49), irrigation system construction in the 1960s, its ‘discovery’ by ornithologists in the late 1960s, the high emigration rates of 1960–1980, its designation as a National Park in 1974, the destructive development works of 1984–86 after Greece’s entry to the EEC and the conversion to intensive bean cultivation in the mid 1980s.