PAOLI C.

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Since 2014, 27 Italian Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are involved in a national programme devoted to the development and adoption of an environmental accounting system. The main goal of such a system is the calculation of the ecological and economic value of the MPAs natural capital and of the ecosystem functions and services generated....

Understanding which drivers cause diversity patterns is a key issue in conservation. Here we applied a spatially explicit model to predict marine benthic diversity patterns according to environmental factors in the NW Mediterranean Sea. While most conservation-oriented diversity studies consider species richness only and neglect equitability,...

Biotic homogenization is an expected effect of biological invasions. Invasive alien species typically show great adaptability to a wide range of environmental conditions and may expand into different habitats, thus reducing the dissimilarity among the recipient communities. We tested this assumption by analyzing a comprehensive database (78...

Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile is an endemic Mediterranean seagrass and a key species of coastal marine ecosystems listed among the priority habitats in the European Directive 92/43 / EEC. P. oceanica is a good biological indicator to define the quality of coastal marine ecosystem, because its high sensitivity to environmental conditions...

Posidonia oceanica is an endemic Mediterranean seagrass used as a 'biological quality element' in monitoring programmes of the EU Water Framework Directive, providing information about coastal ecosystems status. The regression of P. oceanica meadows caused a growing interest among policy makers to assess the value of seagrasses and to increase...

Geospatial models are used to predict the distribution of terrestrial and marine species, according to their ecological and ethological habits. The bottlenose dolphin is a cosmopolitan marine top predator, inhabiting most of the ocean, with the exception of polar and subpolar waters. This wide distribution is associated with a remarkable...

The coastal marine area hosts among the most productive ecosystems in the world, in terms of biomass and species richness. These ecosystems' natural capital stocks provide essential flows of resources for the environ-ment and human life. The distribution of natural capital (NC) and environmental flows (ENFL) characterizing the coastal marine...

A growing interest in the quantification of the economic value of ecosystems arose in the last decades aiming at raising awareness of the general public towards the preservation of biodiversity and supporting policy-makers in the process of creating new legal instruments. In the Mediterranean Sea, the canopy-forming macroalgae of the genus...

Littorals represent highly dynamic and complex systems which undergo changes imposed by several environmental factors and human-induced disturbances. Some coastal habitats, like Posidonia oceanica meadows, are considered as biological indicators thanks to their susceptibility to pressures and changes, according to the European Water Framework...

Tourism and cruise tourism in 3 municipalities along the ligurian coast were studied through emergy analysis. Two municipalities are inside the Portofino MPA. The environmental costs and the economic benefits of tourism activities were assessed in the local territory. Moreover the load imposed to the environment by cruise ship tourism was...