First basin scale spatial-temporal characterization of underwater sound in the Mediterranean Sea.

Anthropogenic underwater noise is an emergent pollutant. Despite several worldwide monitoring programs, only few data are available for the Mediterranean Sea, one of the global biodiversity hotspots. The results of the first continuous acoustic programme run at a transnational basin scale in the Mediterranean Sea are here presented. Recordings were done from March 2020 to June 2021, including the COVID-19 lockdown, at nine stations in the Northern Adriatic Sea. Spatial-temporal variations of the underwater sound are described, having one third octave band sound pressure levels (SPLs) from 10 Hz to 20 kHz as metrics. Higher and more variable SPLs, mainly related to vessel traffic, were found close to harbours, whereas Natura 2000 stations experienced lower SPLs. Lower values were recorded during the lockdown in five stations. Median yearly SPLs ranged between 64 and 95 as well as 70 and 100 dB re 1 µPa for 63 and 125 Hz bands, respectively. These values are comparable with those previously found in busy shallow EU basins but higher levels are expected during a business-as-usual period. This is a baseline assessment for a highly impacted and environmental valuable area, that needs to be managed in a new sustainable blue growth strategy.

First assessment of underwater sound levels in the Northern Adriatic Sea at the basin scale.

The protection of marine habitats from human-generated underwater noise is an emerging challenge. Baseline information on sound levels, however, is poorly available, especially in the Mediterranean Sea. To bridge this knowledge gap, the SOUNDSCAPE project ran a basin-scale, cross-national, long-term underwater monitoring in the Northern Adriatic Sea. A network of nine monitoring stations, characterized by different natural conditions and anthropogenic pressures, ensured acoustic data collection from March 2020 to June 2021, including the full lockdown period related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Calibrated stationary recorders featured with an omnidirectional Neptune Sonar D60 Hydrophone recorded continuously 24 h a day (48 kHz sampling rate, 16 bit resolution). Data were analysed to Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs) with a specially developed and validated processing app. Here, we release the dataset composed of 20 and 60 seconds averaged SPLs (one-third octave, base 10) output files and a Python script to postprocess them. This dataset represents a benchmark for scientists and policymakers addressing the risk of noise impacts on marine fauna in the Mediterranean Sea and worldwide.

Spatial and temporal analysis of cumulative environmental effects of offshore wind farms in the North Sea basin.

The North Sea basin is one of the busiest maritime areas globally with a considerable number of anthropogenic pressures impacting the functioning of the marine ecosystem. Due to growing EU ambitions for the deployment of large offshore wind farm projects (OWF), as part of the 2050 renewable energy roadmap, there is a key need for a holistic understanding of OWF potential impacts on the marine ecosystem. We propose a holistic Cumulative Effect Assessment methodology, applied using a geo-spatial open-source software, to assess impacts of OWF related pressures on selected seabed habitats, fish, seabird and mammal species. We take into account pressures specific to the three OWF development phases, spanning 1999-2050, for the entire North Sea basin. Our results underline 2022 as the peak year of cumulative impacts for the approved OWFs, followed by a considerable increase in potential impacts of the planned 212GWs, by 2050. The spatio-temporal analysis of the OWF environmental impacts presents the shift between highly impacted areas over the studied timeline and distinguishes between concentrated areas of high impacts (S-E of UK) and dispersed areas of high impacts (Germany). Our results can inform decision-makers and the OWF industry in a joint effort to mitigate the environmental impacts of future large OWF developments.

Multi-objective zoning for aquaculture and biodiversity.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food production industry in the world yet research and guidance demonstrating strategic multi-objective zoning for sector expansion is scarce. Quantifying and mitigating conflicts and impact on sensitive coastal environments through jointly-optimized objectives for aquaculture and biodiversity simultaneously has not been tested yet. We here develop and evaluate six alternative planning scenarios for one of the European Union's highest priority bivalve shellfish aquaculture areas, the Emilia-Romagna Region in Italy. We i) develop an aquaculture profitability surface as a function of the distance from main ports, and in parallel build a fine-scale aquaculture suitability distribution surface for important commercial species using multi-criteria analysis; ii) prioritize protected areas for biodiversity while testing how different considerations of human impacts influence priorities; iii) simultaneously plan for aquaculture and biodiversity while minimizing impacts on other maritime activities. We compare results from different scenarios according to how well they capture suitable aquaculture habitats and minimize impacts. We introduce a new evaluation method for scenario comparison in spatial optimization using a nearest-neighbor analysis for spatial pattern similarities. Lastly, we test the "value of information" provided by our investment in developing the fine-scale suitability surface to improve efficiencies. We find that an integrated multi-objective zoning approach, which simultaneously optimizes for biodiversity and aquaculture, supports more efficient planning than traditional sector specific growth strategies. We also discovered that the fine-scale suitability model delivered a 5% more efficient solution than the simple distance function, highlighting the role of proxy cost surfaces and diminished returns from investing in comprehensive habitat suitability analysis in regions without much variation in key parameters. We offer evidence of improved efficiency and practical guidance for integrated planning in Blue Growth agendas. Our analysis can be applied in any context where multiple objectives occur for aquaculture sector growth and biodiversity conservation.

The effects of COVID-19 induced lockdown measures on maritime settings of a coastal region.

The spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) caused an unprecedented implementation of lockdown measures across world's nations. Veneto Region, located in North-Eastern Adriatic Sea was one of the first maritime regions in Italy and Europe subjected to progressive lockdown restrictions. We systematically analyse the effects of national lockdown policies on maritime settings of the region using Automated Identification System (AIS) data from fishing vessels, passenger ships, tanker and cargo vessels collected through the Aqua Alta Oceanographic Tower (AAOT). We derive consequences on vessel activities during the March-April 2020 lockdown, by using a data-driven, comparative spatio-temporal analysis of vessel trajectories. Results show that compared to the same period of 2017, vessel activity were reduced by 69% during the lockdown, fishing activities reduced by 84% and passenger traffic by 78%. We register a restart of fishing activity in the third week of April 2020. We suggest that the presented conceptual and spatial assessment protocol can guide future research on environmental and socio-economic effects of COVID-19 on marine realms and contribute to further interdisciplinary research with other marine scientific fields.

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.

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.

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 ADRIPLAN data 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 user-friendly interfaces appropriate to decision-makers, regional authorities, academics and MSP stakeholders. An effective MSP-oriented integrated system of web-based software, users and services is proposed. It includes four components: the Tools4MSP 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.

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.

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.

[Epidemiology of traffic accidents in the province of Trento: first results of an integrated surveillance system (MITRIS)]. / Epidemniologia degli incidenti stradali in Trentino: priimi risultati di un sistema integrato di monitoraggio (MITRIS).

OBJECTIVE: Different data sources are available for the surveillance of road traffic accidents. Taken separately all have important limits. Therefore the integration of medical and non medical data are essential for the construction of a surveillance system able to direct preventive and repressive actions. DESIGN: Cross sectional study. A computerized system for the rapid and precise unification of medical data with data collected by the police force has been realized. The model is embedded in a Geographic Information System (WebGIS), providing the facility for additional spatial data analysis and modelling. Maps of the spatial density of the accidents which consider also the severity of the injuries from a medical point of view have been developed. Risk factors associated with the severity of the injuries have been evaluated by uni- and multivariate statistical analysis. The statistical significance of the associations have been tested with Pearson's test. Confidential intervals of the Odds ratios were calculated with a probability of 95%. SETTING: Province of Trento, Italy. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Number, dynamics and localization of road traffic accidents, activity of ambulance services, access to emergency departments and hospital admissions RESULTS: For 805/930 injured persons it was possible to link the medical data to those collected by the police forces. 111 (16%) accidents have been classified as severe (with hospital admission) and 694 as moderate (without hospital admission). The most important risk factors associated with the severity are represented by the frontal crash and by being a vulnerable road user (pedestrian, cyclist and motorcyclist), specially those <15 years of age. The classification of the most important sites of road traffic accidents in the Trento municipality was significantly modified by the integration of the medical data giving more importance to the more dangerous sites in terms of severity of the injuries. CONCLUSION: This study shows the feasibility of an integrated surveillance of road traffic accidents by using routinely collected data on a local basis.