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ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on July 30, 2008
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2008 65(8):1436-1441; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsn117
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© 2008 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following ICES Journal of Marine Science issue: Marine Environmental Indicators: Utility in Meeting Regulatory Needs [View the issue table of contents]

Development of a multistep indicator-based approach (MIBA) for the assessment of environmental quality of harbours

Valentina Marin1, Mariapaola Moreno1, Paolo Vassallo1, Luigi Vezzulli2 and Mauro Fabiano1

1 Department for the Study of Territory and Its Resources (DIPTERIS), University of Genoa, Corso Europa 26, 16132 Genoa, Italy
2 Department of Biology (DIBIO), University of Genoa, Viale Benedetto XV, 16132 Genoa, Italy

Correspondence to V. Marin: tel: +39 010 353 8069; fax: +39 010 353 8066; e-mail: marin{at}dipteris.unige.it

Marin, V., Moreno, M., Vassallo, P., Vezzulli, L., and Fabiano, M. 2008. Development of a multistep indicator-based approach (MIBA) for the assessment of environmental quality of harbours. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 1436–1441.

Environmental pollution in harbours can have detrimental effects on the port, its users, and the surrounding environment. Despite these risks, the Italian legal framework for marine environmental quality does not apply to harbours and marinas, so monitoring is not mandatory. With the aim of supporting environmentally sound management, we propose an indicator-based protocol to assess the environmental quality of harbours through the development of a flexible and site-specific multistep indicator-based approach (MIBA), which gives special consideration to local features. MIBA comprises three steps: (1) development of a simple tool for harbour-specific identification of vulnerable areas and for designing monitoring schemes; (2) selection of suitable environmental quality indicators of different levels of complexity and applicability to the typologies of risks involved; and (3) development of a user-friendly interpretation scheme based on categorical risk values and a visualization code. The approach has been tested in two case studies in marinas located in the Ligurian Sea (Italy).

Keywords: environmental management systems, harbour, indicators, monitoring, sediment quality, water quality

Received 11 November 2007; accepted 15 May 2008; advance access publication 30 July 2008.


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