La costa oliqua. The oblique coast

This volume collects the results of the IMCA Integrated Monitoring of Coastal Areas, research, that has lasted about two years. The aims of the work are highly specialist. In fact, the intention was to set up coastal landscape survey protocols that can compare layered data supplied by satellite scans with traditional data (based on maps and charts) and analytical findings (from field surveys, sea water sampling, etc.). This should yield high performance information systems collecting satellite data, serving to carry out the necessary monitoring procedures, as well as to offer a service permitting the periodical issue of theme maps, reporting the water quality, for instance, or evolutions of the coastline or of human settlement areas. All this could be accomplished thanks to the integration of satellite, survey and sampling data with those calculated from numerical models, thus following the speed of change occurring in coastal landscape, characterized by so very high a potential for transformation. The strip of territory between land and sea is a marginal area, an environment “under stress”, called an ecotone by ecologists. It is subject to extremely dynamic processes and complex interaction phenomena between the land and sea environments, whose effects can be gauged by markers covering a wide range of space and time scales. The present research was proposed as a means of instituting active surveillance and control measures of these phenomena. These could have wide applications in the fields of environmental protection and sustainable planning and management of the coastal landscape, of tourism, fish and seafood breeding farms, transport systems, etc. It is important to note that the research was funded within the context of projects for pre-competitive development, allowing for mixed partnerships among researchers and small and medium-sized specialist enterprises experimenting with applied methodologies and sciences. In the present case, companies dealing with satellite surveys and highly qualified marine biology survey firms able to produce amphibian services and machinery, such as those equipped to deal with coastline surveys during passage of the satellite overhead. Pre-competitive research, therefore, involves forming a mixed group of researchers working in close contact with specialist firms to produce results that will then be patented and/or commercially produced for future markets as these emerge. The research outcome will be judged successful if it is able to anticipate demands for the various research issues and to intercept cogent interests urgently needing tools to satisfy them, and if it is capable of supporting decision making strategies for problem solving. To create the IMCA system, the various research teams needed to work in close sequential contact and develop a highly collaborative spirit. On one hand the mathematical models needed to be calibrated on a series of parameters measured on field and integrated with remote metrics. On the other, algorithms extracting environmental parameters from satellite data needed to be implemented, and in turn compared with the results obtained from the aforesaid mathematical models. All this activity underlined the need to foster a strong integration among the different work groups, that needed to speak the same language, especially when interfacing with the “hard sciences” of the mathematical models field.