Stefano Menegon

Addressing uncertainty in modelling cumulative impacts within maritime spatial planning in the Adriatic and Ionian region

Maritime spatial planning (MSP) is envisaged as a tool to apply an ecosystem-based approach to the marine and coastal realms, aiming at ensuring that the collective pressure of human activities is kept within acceptable limits. Cumulative impacts (CI) assessment can support science-based MSP, in order to understand the existing and potential impacts of human uses on the marine environment. A CI assessment includes several sources of uncertainty that can hinder the correct interpretation of its results if not explicitly incorporated in the decision-making process. This study proposes a three-level methodology to perform a general uncertainty analysis integrated with the CI assessment for MSP, applied to the Adriatic and Ionian Region (AIR). We describe the nature and level of uncertainty with the help of expert judgement and elicitation to include all of the possible sources of uncertainty related to the CI model with assumptions and gaps related to the case-based MSP process in the AIR. Next, we use the results to tailor the global uncertainty analysis to spatially describe the uncertainty distribution and variations of the CI scores dependent on the CI model factors. The results show the variability of the uncertainty in the AIR, with only limited portions robustly identified as the most or the least impacted areas under multiple model factors hypothesis. The results are discussed for the level and type of reliable information and insights they provide to decision-making. The most significant uncertainty factors are identified to facilitate the adaptive MSP process and to establish research priorities to fill knowledge gaps for subsequent planning cycles. The method aims to depict the potential CI effects, as well as the extent and spatial variation of the data and scientific uncertainty; therefore, this method constitutes a suitable tool to inform the potential establishment of the precautionary principle in MSP.

Multi-objective spatial tools to inform maritime spatial planning in the Adriatic Sea

This research presents a set of multi-objective spatial tools for sea planning and environmental management in the Adriatic Sea Basin. The tools address four objectives: 1) assessment of cumulative impacts from anthropogenic sea uses on environmental components of marine areas; 2) analysis of sea use conflicts; 3) 3-D hydrodynamic modelling of nutrient dispersion (nitrogen and phosphorus) from riverine sources in the Adriatic Sea Basin and 4) marine ecosystem services capacity assessment from seabed habitats based on an ES matrix approach. Geospatial modelling results were illustrated, analysed and compared on country level and for three biogeographic subdivisions, Northern-Central-Southern Adriatic Sea. The paper discusses model results for their spatial implications, relevance for sea planning, limitations and concludes with an outlook towards the need for more integrated, multi-functional tools development for sea planning.

RITMARE: Semantics-aware Harmonisation of Data in Italian Marine Research

Abstract RITMARE is a Flagship Project by the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR) and coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). It aims at the interdisciplinary integration of national marine research. In pursuing a Linked Open Data (LOD) vocation, the RITMARE sub-project 7 is building the necessary domain-related data structures by leveraging existing RDF-based schemata and sources. These data structures are grounding semantics-aware profiling of end users, data providers, and resources. The goal is designing a flexible infrastructure that adapts to the audiences specificities.

The RITMARE Starter Kit bottom-up capacity building for geospatial data providers

Capacity building by data providers is a fundamental task in the creation of a decentralized Spatial Data Infrastructure. This challenge has been tackled in the RITMARE Flagship Project by providing the Starter Kit, a comprehensive set of domain-oriented software components that exposes standard services for the management of geospatial information. We report on the characteristics of this toolkit, developed by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), particularly with regard to the underlying service-oriented architecture and the novel semantics-aware methodology that is proposed for metadata editing.

Addressing cumulative effects, maritime conflicts and ecosystem services threats through MSP-oriented geospatial webtools

Abstract To solve conservation and planning challenges in the marine environment, researchers are increasingly developing geospatial tools to address impacts of anthropogenic activities on marine biodiversity. The paper presents a comprehensive set of built-in geospatial webtools to support Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) and environmental management objectives implemented into the Tools4MSP interoperable GeoPlatform. The webtools include cumulative effects assessment (CEA), maritime use conflict (MUC) analysis, MSFD pressure-driven CEA and a CEA-based marine ecosystem service threat analysis (MES-Threat). The tools are tested for the Northern Adriatic (NA) Sea, one of the most industrialized sea areas of Europe using a case study driven modelling strategy. Overall results show that coastal areas within 0–9 nm in the Gulf of Trieste, Grado-Marano and Venice lagoon and Po Delta outlet are subjected to intense cumulative effects and high sea use conflicts mainly from port activities, fishery, coastal and maritime tourism and maritime shipping. Linking MES into CEA provided novel information on locally threatened high MES supporting and provisioning habitats such Cymodocea beds and infralittoral fine sands, threats to cultural MES are most pronounced in coastal areas. Results are discussed for their geospatial relevance for regional planning, resource management and their applicability within MSP and environmental assessment.

Addressing transboundary conservation challenges through marine spatial prioritization

The Adriatic and Ionian Region is an important area for both strategic maritime development and biodiversity conservation in the European Union (EU). However, given that both EU and non-EU countries border the sea, multiple legal and regulatory frameworks operate at different scales, which can hinder the coordinated long-term sustainable development of the region. Transboundary marine spatial planning can help overcome these challenges by building consensus on planning objectives and making the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and its influence on economically important sectors more explicit. We address this challenge by developing and testing 4 spatial prioritization strategies with the decision-support tool Marxan, which meets targets for biodiversity conservation while minimizing impacts to users. We evaluated these strategies in terms of how priority areas shift under different scales of target setting (e.g., regional vs. country level). We also examined the trade-off between cost-efficiency and how equally solutions represent countries and maritime industries (n = 14) operating in the region with the protection-equality metric. We found negligible differences in where priority conservation areas were located when we set targets for biodiversity at the regional versus country scale. Conversely, the prospective impacts on industries, when considered as costs to be minimized, were highly divergent across scenarios and biased the placement of protection toward industries located in isolation or where there were few other industries. We recommend underpinning future marine spatial planning efforts in the region through identification of areas of national significance, transboundary areas requiring cooperation between countries, and areas where impacts on maritime industries require careful consideration of the trade-off between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic objectives.

Tackling challenges for Mediterranean sustainable coastal tourism: An ecosystem service perspective

Coastal tourism is a growing industry sector in the Mediterranean Basin. This and the other human activities occurring along the coastline share space and resources, leading to conflicts for divergent uses. Moreover, the overexploitation of natural resources degrades and depletes coastal habitats, with negative feedback effects for all human activities. Hence, both tourism and the other human activities have to consider their dependence on coastal ecosystem services, and act at technical and policy level to reach a compromise that preserves natural resources in the long term. Here we provide a conceptual framework illustrating the complex relationships and trade-offs among threats from coastal tourism and from other human activities and coastal ecosystem services, with a focus on cultural ones. We discuss the negative feedbacks on tourism development and provide examples of geospatial analysis on cumulative threats generated by other human activities and affecting tourism itself. The proposed conceptual framework and the threat analysis aim at highlighting the negative feedback effects of human driven threats on the development of Mediterranean coastal tourism, through an ecosystem service perspective. Both tools provide valuable insight for supporting decision makers and planners in achieving integrated coastal management, with a focus on sustainable tourism.

Tools4MSP: an open source software package to support Maritime Spatial Planning

This paper presents the Tools4MSP software package, a Python-based Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for geospatial analysis in support of Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) and marine environmental management. The suite was initially developed within the ADRIPLANdata portal, that has been recently upgraded into the Tools4MSP Geoplatform (data.tools4msp.eu), an integrated web platform that supports MSP through the application of different tools, e.g., collaborative geospatial modelling of cumulative effects assessment (CEA) and marine use conflict (MUC) analysis. The package can be used as stand-alone library or as collaborative webtool, providing userfriendly interfaces appropriate to decision-makers, regional authorities, academics and MSP stakeholders. An effectiveMSP-oriented integrated system of web-based software, users and services is proposed. It includes four components: theTools4MSP Geoplatform for interoperable and collaborative sharing of geospatial datasets and for MSP-oriented analysis, the Tools4MSP package as stand-alone library for advanced geospatial and statistical analysis, the desktop applications to simplify data curation and the third party data repositories for multidisciplinary and multilevel geospatial datasets integration. The paper presents an application example of the Tools4MSP GeoNode plugin and an example of Tools4MSP stand-alone library for CEA in the Adriatic Sea. The Tools4MSP and the developed software have been released as FOSS under the GPL 3 license and are currently under further development. Subjects Data Science, Scientific Computing and Simulation, Spatial and Geographic Information Systems