The European Marine Strategy Framework Directive has defined the descriptors of Good Environmental Status (GES) in marine waters (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/marine/good-environmental-status/index_en.htm). It is not common that an official document represents a conceptual revolution, but this is the exception that confirms the rule. The quality of the environment has been commonly evaluated by using physical and chemical descriptors that can be easily measured with automated instruments like satellites, buoys, gliders, etc. The values of each variable are ranked, and limits are posed. If the values go over the limits, the state of the environment is compromised. Nice and clean. The rationale behind this approach privileges the chemico-physical causes of possible malfunctions of the environment, disregarding their effects. The new rationale focuses on the effects, and the centre of the new way of measuring GES are biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The message is clear: who cares if the values of some physical and chemical variables are over, or within, the limits? What is important is that the living component is in good state. Cumulative impacts, in fact, can lead to bad environmental status even if the values of all the physical and chemical descriptors are below the limits. Taken singularly, they are not expected to compromise the quality of the environment, whereas, once acting in synergy, they might be a serious impact. To cope with this shortcoming, here are the new descriptors.
The first one is biodiversity. The second one is the presence of non-indigenous species. The remaining nine, even when they consider physical, chemical or geological variables, require proper functioning of the ecosystem, linked to a good state of biodiversity.
In the sea, with fisheries, we are still hunters and gatherers. This means that Nature is still in such a pristine state to allow the massive drawing of resources from natural populations, something that is not possible on land since centuries. Animals are a key component of marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and, thus, zoology is a key discipline in this new vision of GES, together with microbiology, botany, and ecology.
That’s the good news. Now here is the bad news: it is not so easy to measure either biodiversity or ecosystem functioning, nor to understand if they are in a good state. There are no magic machines that, at the press of a button, can give us a number that represents the value of biodiversity, not to speak of ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, the scientific community is losing taxonomists at a fast pace, and the new ones will have to answer the questions of GES if they want to find a role for their research, also in terms of funding attraction. It is a big challenge for our disciplines and embraces all the facets of zoology. The state of biodiversity can be measured through the health of individuals of selected species, while analysing their structures and functions, or their populations, or their ecological roles, with a range of approaches that embraces all the sub-disciplines that make up zoology.
GES requires a synthetic approach that gives added value to the apparently separate sub-disciplines of zoology, bringing them all under the umbrella of a new natural history, treasuring the recent advances in our understanding of the facets of the natural world.
New machines will have to be invented, so as to answer the questions of GES, new concepts will have to be elaborated, and new expertise will have to be built.
Revolutions destroy previous states of affairs, and this is rather easy. Then they must be followed by the evolution of a new vision, with a phase of construction that requires a positive attitude leading to a new and better state of affairs, a much more difficult task indeed.
This is an exciting time to be a zoologist, if we will be ready to take the challenges of GES. The Italian Journal of Zoology is a natural outlet for the building of this new knowledge, bridging the gaps among the various approaches and focusing on what GES prescribes.
Ferdinando Boero
Editor-in-Chief