Vedra, Spain,Oct.27,2023(Lusa)- Pollution, overfishing and climate change are threatening species in the Minho river basin, António Martinho, a technician from the National Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests who is part of the Migra Minho cross-border project, told reporters on Friday. "All of these species have problems in common: pollution, overfishing, climate change, and all of this is contributing to the fact that we have fewer and fewer natural stocks of these species," the senior technician from the Northern Regional Directorate for Nature Conservation and Forests told reporters. At stake are species such as lamprey, shad, sea trout, salmon and eel, according to an explanation given by the technician at an ichthyological station on the banks of the River Ulla, in Ximonde, in Galicia, Spain. On Thursday afternoon, juvenile salmon were released near a treatment plant in the Galician town as part of a visit by the European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reform, Elisa Ferreira, to the Migra Miño/Minho project, co-financed by the Interreg cross-border programme, which between 2014 and 2020 released 140,000 juvenile salmon into the rivers. In the case of climate change, the main consequences for the species' habitat "have to do with the physico-chemical properties of the water, with the temperature, with everything that the ecosystem offers, which is a different ecosystem in terms of living conditions". "We're changing habits here that are intrinsic to the life cycles of each of these populations, and so we're changing their lives a lot, and they must feel extremely confused by all this," added António Martinho. In recent years, according to the technician, there have been "interesting peaks in the return of these species to the river", specifically the migratory ones, but there are "years when they don't appear". "At the moment, the river is flowing at a rate where the most vigorous individuals don't have so many obstacles. If the river runs out of water, they'll have a lot more obstacles. In other words, they'll find it harder to get to the spawning grounds" since it's harder to get there "if there's no water", so the phenomenon "has everything to do with climate change". Pablo Caballero Javierre, head of the Nature Conservation Unit of the Regional Government of Galicia, also spoke of "five years of worrying decline" in the presence of salmon in the region, as the species suffers from "all the problems that can occur in rivers and all the problems that can occur in the sea". "The problems there can be in the river, with climate change, [is that] when there's a drought that affects them, especially at the time when they have to expand and distribute themselves throughout the river, that's a bad year for salmon," he explained. In the sea, meanwhile, technicians suspect that the problems are related to climate change and linked to "excess ice melt". Despite the end of funding for the Migra Miño/Minho project, which totalled 2.2 million euros, cooperation continues between institutions on both sides of the border, and there are also common environmental and fishing rules, according to the Spanish official. "The Migra Minho project has left a very interesting legacy for the future. We were able to eliminate barriers that existed on the river, and in order to improve the river continuum, we were able to build new ones and readapt and rehabilitate weirs," something that without the project "wouldn't have been possible," concluded António Martinho. In April 2022, Pablo Caballero Javierre told Lusa that almost 700,000 salmon had been restocked since 2000, a figure he estimates to be close to 800,000 by today's date. *** Lusa travelled at the invitation of the European Commission *** JE/ADB // ADB. Lusa