Assessing conservation status on coastal dunes: A multiscale approach

Coastal dune systems are particularly fragile and threatened environments, which, however, provide fundamental ecosystem services to nearby urban areas acting for example as protective buffers against erosion. Correctly assessing their conservation status is a priority in order to manage them adequately and to plan urban development in coastal regions. In this paper we propose a practical multiscale method for the assessment of the conservation status of sandy coastal environment. The proposed method is articulated in two stages, one focusing on the landscape and the other on the plant community level. In the first phase mosaic structure and composition of the coastal landscape are analyzed using a series of indicators: natural coastal surface, richness of land cover typologies, landscape diversity and evenness, number and average size of habitat patches, and mean shape index. At a detailed scale, floristic, vegetational and structural aspects of the dune plant communities are analyzed along the main environmental gradient by measuring: spatial connectivity and richness of boundaries, species diversity, eveness and chorological index. In this work we apply and test the method in an experimental area on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy (Latium region), comparing the conservation status of two study sites.