Implications of industrialisation and urbanisation on Danube fish, fisheries and fish consumption in late 19th and early 20th century Vienna.
Abstract
The fish community of the Viennese Danube changes since centuries due to climate change, river use and fisheries. In the 2nd half of the 19th century these change reached an unprecedented scale. This process was triggered by industrialisation and the evolution of Vienna as European metropole. Both factors enabled and required at the same time the systematic regulation of the Danube, which started in Vienna in 1870. The development of the Danube as international shipping corridor and later as hydropower producer together with the expansion of urban land in the floodplains resulted in a fundamental change of the fish community and reduced fish stocks. New technologies in fish breeding and stocking of non native fish species should have compensated the loss of this important food resource. This attempt was only partially successful but increased the fish community change. The Danube and its tributaries supplied the Viennese population for centuries with fish. With growing population supply regions were situated in further distances. In the 1880s trading of fish from Upper and Lower Austria, Burgenland, Bohemia and Hungary as well as of carps from aquaculture could no longer meet the demand. The new railway lines could compensate for this lack of fish as they allowed the import of marine fish. The connection between the development of individual fish species and fish stocks, river engineering, fisheries management, increase of technology and science, urbanisation and industrialisation is hitherto not investigated in detail. This project aims at contributing to closing this knowledge gap by investigating the evolution of the Danube fish community between the first systematic channelization of the river from 1870-1875 and the 1920s against the background of river channelization, fisheries and urban fish supply.
keywords Viennese Danube historical fish community fish supply fisheries
Publikationen
Project staff
Gertrud Haidvogl
Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dr.phil. Gertrud Haidvogl
gertrud.haidvogl@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-81204
Project Leader
01.10.2015 - 31.03.2016