Implementing the Monitoring and Restoration of Marine Ecosystems Impacted by Offshore Platform

Vast marine areas still require an extensive exploration prior the onset of any industrial extractive activity and some areas could be degraded due to the intense exploitation activities. The exploration of the seafloor for the exploitation of natural resources is increasing the global concerns for the potential detrimental consequences and there is an urgent need of developing eco-sustainable tools and approaches for better environmental monitoring. New monitoring protocols and technologies are becoming available for the assessment of the status and, eventually, habitat restoration of degraded habitats. In order to cope with the large heterogeneity of seafloor ecosystems, the current marine monitoring needs to be enforced either in temporal and spatial scales. According to the ecosystem-based approach and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), organisms and ecosystems should be at the centre of marine management strategies, which requires the achievement of a good environmental status either in coastal and deep-sea ecosystems. The new spatial-temporal monitoring strategy should be based on the best available technologies including mobile platforms, autonomous vehicles, and animal-mediated data acquirement, enabling an adaptive and extensive monitoring of marine ecosystems. Established protocols for the biologically-based monitoring should be based on the availability of essential environmental and ecological variables able to identify criteria for the sustainable exploitation of vulnerable marine ecosystems. Here we present an analysis of the essential variables that will allow the implementation of the Marine Strategy for the development of a new eco-sustainable blue-based economy able also to identify the criteria to assess the restoration/recovery of degraded habitats.