Testing Different Approaches for Quality Assessment Using the Benthic Community: Examples from the Northern Adriatic Sea

Habitat quality indicators for the marine coastal environment are in great demand following recent developments in the Water Framework Directive (WFD) which establishes that the ecological status of the water has to be determined by the condition of the biological elements including macrobenthos. Each member State should identify useful monitoring procedures for its water bodies and take into account the peculiar characteristics of its different coastal environments. In Italy, the Northern Adriatic Sea is an enclosed and very shallow sea, strongly influenced by the runoff of several rivers draining an intensively cultivated and inhabited area, resulting in a generally high trophic condition. Moreover these rivers create along the coastline a continuum of different environments, such as deltaic areas and bar-built estuaries. For this reason, we considered two different approaches: (i) the application of two biotic indices, from those indicated by WG COAST, to soft bottom macrobenthos data in the coastal environment, and (ii) the development of a fuzzy logic model based on hard bottom macrobenthos data in the lagoon environment.