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Developing a scuba trail vulnerability index (STVI): a case study from a Mediterranean MPA

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Abstract

Scuba diving is now one of the major form of commercial use of marine protected areas (MPAs) around the world and the control of its potential impacts on the marine environment represents a fundamental key to manage this recreational activity in highly dived areas. A potential tool to tackle such issues has been thought to be the definition of a value of recreational carrying capacity of an area, but this approach has been rarely considered management-effective. Therefore, the first step for effectively managing scuba-diving should be ‘bottom-up’: characterizing the benthic communities potentially affected by diving and evaluating their vulnerability. Aim of this paper is to propose a tool to define an index of vulnerability for dive trails (STVI: scuba trail vulnerability index). This has taken into consideration both physical and biological features of each trail. All the considered features are represented by non-quantitative variables, because either they are purely qualitative or their quantitative measurement is impractical. The management of such qualitative information and its translation into a formal methodology was performed by means of fuzzy logic, which has been repeatedly proposed as a powerful technique to develop indices of environmental quality. The approach adopted in this study provided a useful tool for the preliminary assessment of the potential vulnerability of benthic assemblages to scuba-diving and may represent an alternative method to the assessment of carrying capacity. The application of this index will enable management strategies for potentially reducing the degradation of benthic organisms/assemblages, and allowing a sustainable use of MPAs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank diving owners operating in the Capo Gallo–Isola delle Femmine MPA for collaboration in identifying dive trails. Many thanks are expressed to two anonymous reviewers for critically reviewing an early draft of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. di Ecologia, Università di Palermo, Via Archirafi, 18, 90123, Palermo, Italy

    Antonio Di Franco, Pasquale Baiata, Marco Milazzo & Renato Chemello

  2. Laboratorio di Zoologia e Biologia Marina, DiSTeBA, Università di Lecce, Via Prov.le Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy

    Antonio Di Franco

  3. Dip. di Ecologia del Territorio, Sez. di Ecologia, Università di Pavia, Via S. Epifanio, 14, 27100, Pavia, Italy

    Agnese Marchini

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Correspondence to Antonio Di Franco.

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Di Franco, A., Marchini, A., Baiata, P. et al. Developing a scuba trail vulnerability index (STVI): a case study from a Mediterranean MPA. Biodivers Conserv 18, 1201–1217 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-008-9461-x

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