VERBI VEnice Research BIbliography

The quality status of surface waters in Europe including transitional environments such as coastal lagoons is regulated by Water Framework Directive [WFD, 2000/60/EU]. WFD requires the quality classification of water bodies and the achievement of a Good ecological state within 2015. The attainment of Good ecological status in the lagoon of Venice is problematic because of the simultaneous presence of numerous anthropogenic (e.g. sediment contamination) and natural pressures (e.g. sediment erosion). During the last 15 years, institutes and regulatory bodies carried out monitoring programs and research works to identify state of, and impacts on lagoon ecosystem. However, the integrated assessment of this information became a priority only since the WFD was approved, both to support WFD implementation and to support a sound management of the lagoon by local public bodies. To reach these goals, an environmental quality integrated assessment methodology was developed, on the basis of Weight of Evidence approach and tools proposed for the implementation of the WFD. The methodology integrates five lies of evidence (LOE), namely Biology, Physico-Chemistry, Chemistry, Ecotoxicology, and Hydromorphology. Every LOE was characterized by indicators specifically developed for the lagoon of Venice. The integration of the LOE allows classifying water bodies obtaining a probabilistic result on the basis of the ratio-to-reference approach. The water bodies were identified by Tagliapietra et al. (2006) on the basis of habitat typologies. In the CORILA project framework (research line 3.11) the integrated assessment methodology was tested in two habitat typologies using a set of monitoring data. Subsequently, the methodology was validated using experimental data collected in 4 sampling stations, two per habitat typology, using homogeneous data to verify the applicability of the methodology. In the validation process, proposed site-specific indicators were assigned to proper LOE, and their results was expressed in quality classes (5 for LOE biology, and 2 for other LOE) defined by expert judgment. To these results was then applied the LOE aggregation procedure to classify the water bodies, which was expressed as the occurrence percentage of the 5 WFD quality classes. The results obtained so far indicates that the application of the procedure using the indices proposed in the research line 3.11 is helpful to integrate different aspects of the lagoon quality, supporting the identification of the key pressures.