A Quantitative Survey Technic for the Assessment of Waterfront
Partimonial and Indicator Marine Species.
Application around Marine Protechted Areas of French Mediterranean Seaand Miyajima National Park (Seto Inland Sea Japan)
Meinesz,Alexandre.1,Ueshima,Hideki.2, Meshiko,Yasuchi.3, Komatsu,Teruhisa4,Vaugelas,Jeande1
1. GIS Posidonie and Laboratoire Environnement Marin Littoral, University of Nice, Nice,
France 2. Government Industrial Research Institute, 3. Mikuniya corporation, 4. Division ofFisheries Ecology, Ocean Research InstituteMarine biodiversity of protected areas must be particularly surveyed to evaluate the healthof the ecosystems and to prevent human impacts. On the waterfront and the intertidal zone, highly
adapted species of fauna and flora can grow, most of them living only in this biotope. They arevery resistant to temperature and salinity variations but are exposed to drifting pollutants such ashydrocarbures or tensioactive detergents.
In most studies, these species are only qualitatively checked (list of species) or theabundance of selected populations are evaluated on transects established perpendicular to thecoast. We propose a survey technique giving an acurate global quantitative approach linked to a
Geographic Information System (GIS).
Along the coast of Seto Inland Sea, the tide amplitude is mainly between 3 to 5 m in high,while in the Mediterranean sea, it is less than 0.5 m. On the narrow intertidal zone, we selected 5to 15 species which are easy to visually assess in situ. Whe choose some species for theirparimonial value, others for their perenial presence or for their indicator value (as the green
nitrophiles algae of the order of Ulvales). Most of these species are present with few individuals,
or grow in the shadow of rocks so that they cannot be monitored by aerial photographs.
Abundance of each species is checked on unit "cells" of 20 meters of coast length whose width isdepending on the tide amplitude and the slope of the waterfront. Other environmental datas arecollected (artificial or natural rocks, sandy bottom, trace of hydrocabures ...)In the Mediterranean sea, 3 people can easily check 50 unit "cells" in two hours, walking
on the sea shore or swiming when cliffs are on the waterfront. On the rocky shore of Seto InlandSea, 5 to 10 people (graduate students with 2 seniors) must walk in parallel along the 20 m coast
length, one hour before and one hour after the lowest tide.
For species less than 100 individuals in front of 20 m of shore, the number of individuals
per unit "cell" is monitored. For the species established as belts parallel to the coastline, the linearof the belt found in front of each 20 m unit "cell" is noted.
Each unit "cell" has a number and is positioned on a plastified aerial photo taken in situ.
After the field work, all data are compiled in an Exel spreadsheet with the numbers of the unit
"cells" as lines and the selected species as columns. This table is linked with the coresponding
unit "cells" drawn on a map with a specific software (Map Grafix). This allows to quickly obtainmaps of each species with reference to their abundance and geographical position.
Natural or anthropic variations can be easily monitored with diachronic surveys. Otherwise
these maps have an hight sensitive and valorisation value for the managment of Marine Parks andother patrimonial coasts, especially for the quantitative evaluation and the precise localisation ofpotentialy endangered species.
In the French Mediterranean sea, in the last decade, 126 km of the waterfront biodiversity
is described with this technique {38,9 km of coast line of the natural marine park of Scandola(Corsica), 65,8 km of the Marine park of Lavezzi (Corsica) with for example 5401 endangered
limpets Patella ferruginea checked and mapped, 21,4 km of the Marine National Park ofPort-Cros}. In 2000 a first application of this technique was successfully used around theNational Park of Miyajima.

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