The biological-ecological and environmental landscape indices and procedures in the planning and sustainable management of the riverine areas – The case of the study of the river Dese and the river Adige

The European Community has elaborated a Directive Proposal, EC No 41/1999, with the purpose of establishing a framework in order to prevent further deterioration of aquatic ecosystems, to promote sustainable water use based on a long-term protection of available water resources, to contribute to mitigating the effects of floods and droughts. This Directive propose a protocol of principles and technical-scientific methods for the evaluation of the river ecological status which shall be integrated in the elaboration of the River Basin Management Plan. This requires a sort of environmental planning that can be defined as an ‘analytic and design process, generally, but not necessarily on wide scale’, by which the Public subject intends to govern a determinate geographical space selecting all the possible variables which constitute the eco-sphere those representing at the best the complexity of the environmental organism. As a matter of fact, the purpose of the environmental planning consist in improving the global quality of the environment through an opportune balance between the human wide-spreading phenomena and the natural resources. It is then a step forward and an improvement of the sector planning as the economical one, the social, and eco-hydrological (prevalence of the biological, chemical, ecological and physical variables), the one of landscape (prevalence of the emotional-perceptive variables), and of town planning (prevalence of the territory organisation variables). A contribution to this method of planning can be given by a model of analysis and environmental evaluation (already applied along the river Adige, the river Dese and its riverine areas) which facilitates the integration in the planning process: the expertise analysis characterise the definition of ecological and biological quality of the river, of ecological — naturalistic — environmental landscape quality of the riparian areas, and of the riverine areas land uses. In this model of integrated management of the territory within the perspective of a sustainable local development, the analyses of the different disciplines are inter-related both in the phase of data implementation and in the final evaluation, thus determining trans-disciplinary cognitive processes and a continuous comparison among different models and analytical methods. This formality of environmental planning is also an integral part of the Recomandation 40 on the Draft European Landscape Convention, where to this term both the meanings of environmental and of aesthetic perception are ascribed.