Integrated environmental characterization of the contaminated marine coastal area of Taranto, Ionian Sea (southern Italy)

The Project RITMARE (la Ricerca ITaliana per il MARE—Italian Research for the sea) is one of the national research programs funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. RITMARE (2012–2016), coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR), and has involved an integrated effort of most of the scientific community working on marine and maritime issues. Within the project, different marine study areas of strategic importance for the Mediterranean were identified: among these, the coastal area of Taranto (Ionian Sea, southern Italy) was chosen for the presence of large industrial settlements and their impact on the marine environment. In particular, the research has been focused on the Mar Piccolo of Taranto, a complex marine ecosystem model important both from an ecological and social–economic points of view. In fact, water, sediments, and biota in the Mar Piccolo have been affected by a wide spectrum of anthropogenic pressures (among others, the most important iron and steel plant in Europe, the largest Italian Navy shipyard, an oil refinery, and shipbuilding activities) for decades. These stress factors have been responsible for a severe environmental contamination, mainly due to heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), organic solvents, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dioxin, with their consequent possible transfer to the aquatic trophic chain also considering the widespread fishing and mussel farming activities in this area. Within the project RITMARE, a task force of researchers composed of hydrogeologists, modellists, sedimentologists, geochemists, chemists, microbiologists, and biologists has contributed to elaborate a working conceptual model with a multidisciplinary approach useful to identify sources of anthropogenic stress, their impacts, and possible solutions of environmental remediation. Several topics have been addressed, among them: identification of sources of contaminants and anthropogenic pressures, distribution of contaminants, water mass circulation and sedimentary fluxes, biogeochemical cycling, bioaccumulation and biomagnification of contaminants, and risk analysis. All of them have been included in the conceptual model of the Mar Piccolo in order to provide the necessary input to a decision support system which should help in evaluating the correct mitigation strategies to be adopted. Therefore, this could be considered a comprehensive pilot study that may be applied to other shallow coastal environments with similar contamination issues. This special issue contains a collection of 22 publications. The review by Cardellicchio et al. (2015) introduces the state of knowledge on the Mar Piccolo, before the beginning of the RITMARE project, the ecological importance of this basin and its environmental issues. Two articles present the output of numerical modeling: the first by Zuffianò et al. (2015) defines the contribution of subaerial and submarine coastal springs to the hydrological dynamic equilibrium of the basin while De Pasca l i s e t a l . (2015) examine the ma in * Tamara Cibic tcibic@ogs.trieste.it