Historical ecology of semi-enclosed basins and coastal areas:Past, present and future of seas at risk

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Introduction

Coastal areas and semi-enclosed basins are peculiar for many reasons: productivity and concentration of natural resources are often larger than in oceanic waters; multiple uses of the sea are present and, as a consequence, large anthropogenic impacts too; and immense cultural heritages are hosted there (Agardy et al., 2005). Thus, coastal areas and semi-enclosed basins constitute excellent models to understand the interactions over time between anthropogenic and natural factors in shaping the status of marine environments, and to define sustainable management strategies.

As human populations have expanded, the anthropogenic pressures in coastal areas have intensified and coastal activities including, among others, fisheries, tourism, pollution of agricultural origin and maritime transport, increasingly play a central role in the economies and livelihoods of people around the world (Neumann et al., 2015). Additionally, even if coastal zones occupy less than 15% of the Earth’s land surface, they are historically more densely populated than the mainland and show higher rates of population growth and urbanization (Neumann et al., 2015). Indeed, since ancient times, coastal zones have attracted humans’ settlements because of the richness of aquatic resources, and for marine trade and transport (Erlandson and Rick, 2010). Coastal ecosystems are among the richest areas of marine biodiversity globally and provide many important services and benefits, such as nutrient cycling and control of water quality, carbon storage and sequestration, food production, provision of habitat, refugia and nursery grounds to animal and plant species (including stocks of commercial value for fisheries), and natural barriers against coastal erosion (Airoldi and Beck, 2007). Moreover, as compared to open oceans, they support worldwide a larger variety of cultural ecosystem services (Garcia Rodrigues et al., 2017).

Similarly, semi-enclosed seas constitute special environments that are much more susceptible to human impacts than the open oceans (Caddy, 1993). Semi-enclosed seas, such as the Mediterranean Sea, were the cradles of human civilization, and thus these ecosystems have been subjected to anthropogenic impacts since ancient times (Caddy, 2000). In addition, their relatively small surfaces and high coastline length–surface ratios imply the sharing of marine resources among countries and make the development and implementation of management actions a challenge (see for instance the Adriatic Sea; Bastari et al., 2016). Over centuries, maritime communities in different coastal areas developed complex and specific systems of exploitation, use and management of natural resources for very different purposes, as shown by the case studies published in this Special Issue.

Nowadays, coastal zones and semi-enclosed seas are increasingly threatened by many factors including pollution, eutrophication, habitat loss and degradation, and overexploitation of resources. Since most changes in these ecosystems are the effects of a long history of human influence, it is important to know when and how humans started to alter them, which activities were practised, and how these ecosystems looked like before large-scale human interference (Lotze and Milewski, 2004). All this would allow a better understanding of the impact of different human pressures and, consequently, to plan sustainable restoration or management strategies (Engelhard et al., 2016). Indeed, humans transformed coastal marine ecosystems and semi-enclosed basins long before modern ecological investigations had begun.

Over the past decades, two new disciplines have emerged providing historical information on marine ecosystems that can usefully complement modern scientific data, i.e. marine historical ecology (MHE) and marine environmental history (MEH). MHE focuses on the study of long-term changes in socio-ecological systems from an ecological perspective, while MEH from a human-centred perspective (MacDiarmid et al., 2016). Researchers use a variety of methods to reconstruct historical human activities and explore their effects on marine ecosystems: a review is provided in Lotze and Worm (2009). Recent studies have shown that our ancestors dramatically affected coastal and semi-enclosed ecosystems much earlier than previously thought, and that some marine ecosystems have substantially changed long before the era of industrialized fishing (e.g. Jackson et al. (2001), Pandolfi et al. (2003), Lotze et al. (2006), Airoldi and Beck (2007), Fortibuoni et al. (2010)). Thus, fisheries’ managers and conservation biologists need to consider the shifting baselines of ecosystem status from historical to recent times Pauly (1995), Máñez et al. (2014) to implement truly sustainable and effective management actions (Engelhard et al., 2016).

Europe has a long coastline including numerous islands, and its coastal ecosystems and semi-enclosed basins are among the most degraded environments on Earth (Lotze et al., 2006). Humans had been exploiting near-shore marine resources throughout the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages Hoffmann (2005), Coll et al. (2010). During late-mediaeval times, intensification and multiplication of human impacts on coastal habitats increased, since coasts became more populated and coastal communities started to commercially exploit marine resources (Hoffmann, 2005). Anthropogenic impacts then dramatically increased during the 19th and 20th centuries resulting in profound modifications to coastal and marine ecosystems (Airoldi and Beck, 2007).

Section snippets

The special issue

This Special Issue is based on the works presented at the meeting “Historical ecology of semi-enclosed basins: past, present and future of seas at risk”, held in Chioggia (Italy) on 3–4 October 2016 in the framework of the EU COST Action Oceans Past Platform (IS1403). The meeting aimed at collating case studies from different European areas (Fig. 1), to document the potential of historical ecology in reconstructing the changes over time of the perception and use of coastal marine resources and

Final remarks

Summing up, this Special Issue exemplifies the fact that historical research is playing an increasingly important role in marine science (Máñez et al., 2014). Seminal studies adopting historical perspectives through different timeframes (e.g. Pauly (1995), Jackson et al. (2001), Pandolfi et al. (2003), Rosenberg et al. (2005)) have developed concepts, such as the “shifting baselines”, or tools as, for instance, the reconstruction and analysis of long-term time series, which are now popular and

Acknowledgements

The articles of this special issue have been presented of the meeting “Historical ecology of semi-enclosed basins: past, present and future of seas at risk”, organized by the University of Padova and Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). The meeting was organized in the framework of and financially supported by the COST Action IS1403, Oceans Past Platform (OPP), by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), and by the University of Padova .

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