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Abstract
In the last ten years, European Directives stressed the necessity to assess the ecological status of marine habitats by means of ecosystem or landscape indicators, rather than just species or chemical ones. In this paper, the seascape approach to characterise and assess the ecological quality of coralligenous rocky shoals of Vado Ligure (Savona, Italy) is introduced. This approach integrates biological, mesological and geomorphological information collected with a Rapid Visual Assessment technique (RVA). The RVA also optimised underwater operations in deep waters where coralligenous reefs usually develop and provided a sufficient amount of data collected by direct inspection. The seascape approach results are appropriate for the characterisation of the coralligenous shoals studied and for the assessment of their ecological quality. The quality of the assemblages was in general low, mainly due to high sedimentary stress; however, some exceptions showing a high ecological quality indicate that, with proper management tools, they would still have good potentialities of recovery.
Acknowledgements
This work was partially done within the frame of the research agreement between DipTeRis (currently DISTAV) and CIMA foundation. The authors are grateful to the Savona Port Authority (Savona, Italy) for conceding baseline multi-beam data, collected in 2006 by Drafinsub Survey, partially reproduced in . R. Ivaldi and the Istituto Geografico della Marina (Genoa, Italy) are thanked for raw bathymetric data of (Prot. SRE 1653) and F. Siccardi for scientific cooperation. Finally, we would like to acknowledge A. Balduzzi (University of Genoa), F. Mastrototaro (University of Bari), A. Occhipinti Ambrogi (University of Pavia) and R. Pronzato (University of Genoa) for advice on some species.