Recent, buried and artificial salt marshes in the Lagoon of Venice, Italy

The availability of monitoring techniques that combine the various parameters of the water masses is particularly needed in coastal environments under human pressure. Foraminifera, a Class of the Kingdom PROTOCTISTA secreting a test, are good indicators of the environment in which they live and, through sediment records, they can define the reference conditions of the past. In the Lagoon of Venice, the diffuse presence of salt marshes helped and facilitated the first stable settlements from the first centuries AD. Due to the relative sea level rise, the places were progressively deserted when the practical issues discouraged costly safeguard interventions; conservation and bank rise works where realized only when historical or town-planning issues required the area maintenance. The present legislation is planning the salt marshes defence and the lagoon morphology re-establishment. In this context, the artificial salt marsh of Mazzorbo has been built during the second half of 1999. Its unsuccessful colonisation by foraminifera shows that this artificial salting is out of the natural dynamism proper to the intertidal morphologies and it may be only classified as a land recovery.