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TOWARDS INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT IN SOUTHERN EUROPEAN COASTAL LAGOONS : THE DITTY PROJECT.

The objective of the DITTY project is to develop the scientific and operational bases for a sustained and rational utilisation of the available resources in Southern European Lagoons, taking into account all relevant impacts from agriculture, urban and economic activities that affect the aquatic environment, by developing information technology tools tailored for these type of ecosystems. The development of reliable information tools requires that the underlying integrated model approaches have been benchmarked across a wide range of catchment-coastal lagoon ecosystem process description. The project thus put considerable emphasis on model validation and benchmarking as well as on detailed and socio-economic assessment of management options, through a close participation of economists and stakeholders.

The project will also develop a proto-type of a Decision Support System (DSS) for the management of coastal lagoons. The DSS will be implemented and tested in five lagoons: Ria Formosa (Portugal), Mar Menor (Spain), Etang de Thau (France), Sacca di Goro (Italy) and Gera(Greece).

Figure 2: typical Mediterranean coastal lagoon; the Mar Menor lagoon.

The general management tool should be able to analyse and simulate the ecosystem effects of lagoon fluid-dynamics, river runoff influence, ecology, nutrients cycles, shellfish farming, macro-algal blooms, as well as the economical implications of different scenario analysis.

Furthermore, such a tool will allow to choose the appropriate time scale to monitor the relevant river-basin-coastal lagoon processes and to help regional or national authorities in developing techniques for assessing the effectiveness of measures designed to achieve good quality status of waters, as described in the Water Framework Directive.

The choice of the sites was also dictated by the fact that good long-term data sets are accessible and that each of the partners has developed good working contacts with local and regional authorities ensuring the exchange of information and user needs will be addressed.

Country	Site	Lagoon Km2	Watershed Km2
Portugal	Rio Formosa	105
Spain	Mar Menor	135
France	Etang de Thau	75	250
Italy	Sacca di Goro	26	3000
Greece	Gera Gulf	43

Test sites in southern Europe

The EU European Land Ocean Interaction Studies (ELOISE) Thematic Network, as well as the IGBP LOICZ programme, will interact with this project. A number of projects within ELOISE have already provided site-specific data (NICE, ROBUST), others have given insights into controlling processes (FECTS etc) that are probably important also in some of the chosen sites.

The LOICZ standard methodology which is being used to assess C, N, and P fluxes into coastal areas from land run-off (estuaries, lagoons etc) will be applied to the five Southern European sites. Resulting multi-annual flux estimates will thus contribute to the flux assessment of the EU Mediterranean basin area and could be used as a template for a wider estimate of fluxes in the Mediterranean Sea.

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