5.7 Environmental considerations

Local regional authorities, management bodies and conservation measures in Greece have often been proved insufficient due to the lack of funding, coordination and integrated coastal zone management policy.

There is lack of scientific information on the environmental state and hydrological regime for many lagoon systems in Greece. Consequently, the practices for the improvement of productivity may often lead to further deterioration of the lagoon environment, resulting in anoxic crises and massive fish mortality. It is important to involve hydrological and ecological monitoring, in order to establish the baselines for a sustainable management and conservation of these particularly sensitive ecosystems.
Lately the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EE (EC, 2000), which is the basic legislative management tool of water resources within the EU, promoted the implementation of the ecosystem approach in order to prevent negative impacts on coastal ecosystems and sectors of activity depending upon them.

Monitoring of coastal lagoons is a crosscutting activity within the Directive in Greece. The design of the monitoring network for Greek transitional waters was based on the results of the implementation of the WFD 2000/60/EE article 5 in Greek coastal waters where 28 transitional water bodies of sufficient size were defined. All these water bodies were considered as “at risk” of succeeding good ecological status up to the year 2015, due to the increased susceptibility of these sensitive ecosystems to anthropogenic pressures; and are thus subject to operational monitoring. For each waterbody, one site within the known or predicted zone of impact was selected, with the exception for some lagoon complexes where more than one site was selected (Fig.5).

Phytoplankton, macroinvertebrates, phytobenthos and fish fauna will be monitored twice a year, whereas the hydro-morphological elements every three years and the physico-chemical elements seasonally.

Figure 5. Monitoring network for transitional waters in Greece

5.8 References

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