Comparative study of ecosystem services provided by two coastal lagoons in relation to their hydrodynamic features

Abstract

All over the world, coastal lagoons can differ in size, geomorphology, hydrodynamics, climatic conditions, etc. while being productive ecosystems in common. Therefore, studying the behavior of these ecosystems by assessing the ecosystem services (ES) they provide is a key to coastal lagoon management and decision-making. This research represents a comparative study of two different coastal lagoons, located respectively in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Baltic Sea. The saline water body, the Oualidia lagoon, despite its small size of only 4 km², provides life and sources of income to the surrounding communities, which makes it an attractive study site for the present research. While the nearly freshwater Curonian lagoon, the largest one in Europe, covers an area of up to 1584 km² is also rich in terms of ES. This comparative research is divided into three main parts, starting with (1) investigating the hydrodynamics of the study sites. (2) An expert-based scoring method was applied to assess the scores of ES in the coastal parts of the study sites for each of the CORINE land-cover classes (CLC). Then, (3) assessing and mapping the ES flow of 13 selected ES in the aquatic areas of both study sites.