Abstract
Integrated coastal management (ICM) relies on the inclusion of economic issues within marine ecology. To assess the progress of this integration, we applied topic modelling and network analysis to explore the pertinent literature (583 Isi-WoS, and 5459 Scopus papers). We classified the topics of interest (i.e., concepts, approaches, and sectors) that combined ecological and economic issues within marine science, we aggregated these topics in fields pertinent to ICM, and tracked the knowledge-exchange between these fields by using an information-flow network. Main findings were: (i) the high trans-disciplinary fashion of studies about marine protection and of those about commercial fisheries, (ii) the weak interaction between studies focusing on potential biohazards and those about environmental management, (iii) the isolation, in the overall information-flow, of studies about ecotourism and aquaculture. We included in a roadmap all the integration routes we detected within ICM, based on the combination of ecological and economic issues. We conclude that, to improve integration, ICM should: (i) Exploit marine protection as a bridge between ecological and economic concepts and approaches, and between maritime economy sectors, (ii) employ systems ecology to pursue trans-disciplinary investigations, (iii) complement systems ecology with citizen science by means of inclusive economic initiatives, such as ecotourism.
Highlights
Coastal areas sustain human populations at any spatial scale [1]
The need for combining these different ambits led to the introduction of the so-called ecological economics, a discipline that is becoming a key pillar of coastal management [13,14]
The most frequent words that establish the conceptual intersection between ecological and economic disciplines in the sea are shown in Tables 1 and 2, and reveal a prevalence of bigrams, with a strong, albeit small, contribution of fisheries issues—fisheries is among the top three words, and fish, fishing among the top ten
Summary
Coastal areas sustain human populations at any spatial scale [1]. These areas are socio-ecological systems, where natural processes, occurring in the biophysical environment, and human activities, mostly concentrated in the urbanized regions, are tightly interconnected [2,3,4]. Coastal management is asked to govern the economic exploitation of the land-sea interface based on: (i) the assessment of the present natural features, (ii) the prediction of the future environmental degradations, and (iii) the evaluation of the economic potential if the environment is managed to maximize harvest in a sustainable way (e.g., see the Evolutionary Governance Theory, [9]) To this latter end, in line with several international political documents (e.g., see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [10], and the Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity [11]), the integrated coastal management (ICM) should reconcile some seemingly antithetic disciplines, such as marine ecology and maritime/marine economy [6,7,8,12]. The need for combining these different ambits led to the introduction of the so-called ecological economics, a discipline that is becoming a key pillar of coastal management [13,14]
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