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International Journal of Marine Science 2013, Vol.3, No.43, 352-360
http://ijms.sophiapublisher.com
352
Research Article Open Access
Coupling of Shoreline Erosion and Biodiversity Loss: Examples from the
Black Sea
N.V. Shadrin
Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, Sevastopol, Ukraine
Corresponding author email: snickolai@yandex.ru
International Journal of Marine Science, 2013, Vol.3, No.43 doi: 10.5376/ijms.2013.03.0043
Received: 25 Jun., 2013
Accepted: 16 Sep., 2013
Published: 23 Sep., 2013
Copyright
©
2013 Shadrin, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Preferred citation for this article:
Shadrin, 2013, Coupling of Shoreline Erosion and Biodiversity Loss: Examples from the Black Sea, International Journal of Marine Science, Vol.3, No.43
352
-
360 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2013.03.0043)
Abstract
The shoreline zone is an area where the sea and land contact and plays a very important role in integrating a sea and its
watershed in a whole system. Among the main environmental problems of the coastal zones, two critical ones are - coastal erosion
and a biodiversity loss. Problems are most pronounced in semi-enclosed seas as the Black sea. Using results of the long-term studies
in different parts of the Black Sea shoreline this paper attempts to make some steps to deepen our understanding of interactions
between biodiversity loss and shoreline erosion. An analysis of the results from several case studies was done. Some mechanisms of
interrelations between coastal erosion and biodiversity changes are also discussed. The increased concentration of mineral particles,
especially hydrophilic ones, as a result of coastal erosion, is a threat not only to benthic organisms, but also to planktonic microalgae
and copepods. This negative impact sharply decreases total productivity of coastal waters. De-vegetation of the beaches and cliffs
increases movement of sand and soil particles from beaches and cliffs due to high acceleration of wind and water erosion. This also
leads to an increased turbidity of marine waters and an associated decrease in their productivity. Other results suggest there is a
decrease in mollusk shell production leading to acceleration of a beach degradation which may also increase cliff abrasion. Coastal
de-vegetation, marine community degradation and coastline erosion interrelate through a network of chains of cause-and-effect that
forms the positive feed-forward and feed-back loops. This creates a self-acceleration mechanism of a development of coastal erosion
and biodiversity loss.
Keywords
Shoreline erosion; De-vegetation; Mussels; Seaweeds; Sea grasses
1 Background
1.1 General introduction
Shoreline zone is a sea-land contact area playing a
very important role in integrating a sea and its
watershed in a whole natural system as a crossroad of
marine and terrestrial fluxes of matter and energy,
connecting marine and terrestrial ecosystems (Zaitsev,
2006; Shadrin, 1998). While marine shoreline
environments are some of the most resource-rich and
economically important ecosystems in the world,
connectivity of structures, functions, and processes that
form and maintain stability and transformability of
these habitats are complex and poorly understood yet.
Among the main current environmental problems of
the coastal zones - are coastline erosion and a
biodiversity loss. Threats to them arise from a range of
stressors which span a spectrum of impact scales from
localized effects to a truly global reach (e.g. climate
change, sea-level rise) (Defeo et al., 2009). Such a
situation is a global threat to human life, livelihoods
and natural life-supporting systems. The coastal zone
is a most populated area in the World and one of the
reasons for such situation in it is an inadequate
management of human activities (Aibulatov and
Artiukhin, 1993; UNDP, 1997). These problems are
most pronounced in semi-enclosed seas as the Sea of
Japan, Mediterranean, Baltic and Black seas, etc
(Lotze et al., 2006; Zaitsev, 2006; Muhai, 2010;
Shadrin et al., 2012), because the areas surrounding
these seas have the highest proportion of lands (altered
by human activities) to length of shoreline. The
unwanted changes of shoreline and biodiversity loss
are caused by the interactions of a lot of the natural
and anthropogenic reasons (Aibulatov and Artiukhin,
1993; Zaitsev, 2006; Defeo et al., 2009; Kosyan et al.,
2012a; Shadrin et al., 2012). Among the natural ones
we can specify the following: global warming, sea