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Using FINE to evaluate Ecological Quality Status in lagoon environments

FINE has been designed to detect the Ecological Quality Status of lagoon environments into the five classes bad, poor, moderate, good, high required by the European Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC.

FINE evaluates the integrity of a lagoon basin through several ecosystem attributes, selected on the basis of established principles of benthic ecology and lagoon ecosystem function.

FINE considers exclusively biological elements, indicated as fundamental in the definition of the Ecological Status by the European Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC: benthic macroinvertebrates and aquatic flora.

FINE is developed with a complex system of 7 metrics and 768 logic rules, thus it is a robust, comprehensive index of the response of natural communities to environmental perturbations. Moreover, FINE is a low-cost, user-friendly tool, which provides clearly interpretable results.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.