Assessing the effectiveness of the Natura 2000 Special Areas of Conservation strategy: the case of N-Adriatic sandy coastal ecosystem.

Coastal sand dune landscapes hold habitats of high economic, social and ecological value on a global scale. At the same time, they are among the most threatened ecosystems worldwide, facing escalating anthropogenic pressures, drawing attention to how to achieve trade-offs among society’s needs in land-use allocation and long-term biodiversity conservation. On the European scale, the most important conservation effort being so far implemented is the Natura 2000 Network (N2K) of protected sites. According to Article 11 of the Habitats Directive, EU member states are asked to provide monitoring, management and impact assessment aiming at the maintenance of the natural habitats and species referred to in Article 2 with particular concern to priority habitat types and species. To date, monitoring has primarily been tackled at wide scale, and a vast number of indicators are being established to provide bases for national and EU level biodiversity conservation assessment as well as for the implementation and evaluation of efficacy of the EC Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans. However, Article 6 also requires member states to take all the necessary measures to ensure a “favourable conservation status” (FCS) on individual N2K site level. As referred to in the Article 1, a sound assessment of FCS requires information on habitats’ structure and function, which reflect patterns and processes at local scale. Therefore, the assessment of the conservation status of habitats’ structure and function necessarily claims for lower level, habitat-and site-based monitoring, as these variables are difficult to measure at coarser scales. The study was undertaken on the North-Adriatic coastal landscape, which suffers from a severe and complex human utilization meanwhile holding high landscape, faunal and floral values. As plant communities, because of their specific nature, are considered good indicators of overall biodiversity and of ecosystem integrity of coastal dune environments, effects of both human and natural disturbance have been analysed through a comparison between real and potential coastal vegetation. To provide a comprehensive framework for sustainable coastal management and development, a multiscale method for the assessment of the conservation status of sandy coastal environment has been applied. The assessing methodology focused first on floristic, vegetational and structural aspects of plant communities that were analyzed along the main environmental gradient, which develops moving inland from the sea edge. At site level, analyses were carried out by means of structural and compositional indicators. At a broader scale, that is, landscape level, we tried to apply some “Resource Use” Indicators to characterise the pressures on coastal N2K sites. Conservation status of N-Adriatic coastal zonation resulted fairly good at only few sites along the coast, mostly located where urban development and tourism are limited by legislation or simply because of the difficulty in reaching them. Elsewhere, real vegetation is deeply different from the potential zonation erosion and tourism pressures truncate the first elements of the zonation, while towns and villages, coastal roads, pines plantations and agriculture truncate the last stages and sandy systems are trapped between erosion on the sea side and human settlements inlands, with no space for natural sediment dynamics and communities development.