FISHERS’ ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE VENICE LAGOON: VERNACULAR TOPONYMY, SPECIES PERCEPTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

The Venice Lagoon is a unique amphibious environment, an aquapelago where water, land, and human communities intertwine in a network of ecological, cultural, and linguistic relationships. In this fragile and mutable space, the continuous and embodied experience of living on the lagoon shapes the lives of its inhabitants, especially of fishers. This deep relationship can be defined as a culture of lagoon: a set of practical knowledge, perceptual categories, linguistic forms, and shared memories that emerge from everyday engagement with an environment in which the boundary between human and nonhuman is constantly negotiated. This thesis aims to explore the contribution of fishers’ local ecological knowledge to the understanding of the lagoon ecosystem, with a specific focus on the relationship between language, perception, and territory. The research is based on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, including 12 semi-structured interviews with fishers from different areas of the lagoon. These conversations document fishers’ perceptions of ongoing ecological change and reveal a rich repertoire of vernacular terms that express classificatory logics different from scientific ones, rooted in direct and multisensory experience. The interview material was analyzed through an inductive qualitative coding process, complemented by co-occurrence analysis and exploratory visualizations to identify recurring patterns and relational structures within the narratives. This first phase is complemented by a second research stage consisting of five additional interviews focused on participatory mapping of vernacular toponymy. Using Google Earth, fishers identified and named the places that constitute their working horizon, such as barene, ghebi, secche, and fishing corridors, whose names preserve traces of past and transformed environments. This cartographic component serves both to make the spatial extent of local knowledge visible and to enable a comparative analysis of convergences and differences across lagoon sectors. The final visualization was produced through GIS processing with the aim of creating an integrated map capable of conveying the semantic and historical density of these places. Overall, the thesis investigates how fishers interpret, name, and inhabit the lagoon, how environmental change is perceived and narrated, how vernacular classifications organise ecological experience, and how spatial knowledge is structured through toponymy. Through an anthropological approach attentive to multispecies relationships, the work explores the lagoon as a dynamic socio-ecological system in which human and more-than-human elements co-produce forms of life, work, and meaning. Recognising this situated knowledge, often marginalised in environmental governance, is essential for imagining more inclusive and sustainable approaches to lagoon management.