The shifting edge. Spatial mismatch and adaptive governance in coastal and marine ecosystems. Integration of Earth Observation with site survey techniques for multiscale spatial analysis, for risk prevention and planning of actions to safeguard and adapt the territory to climate change

The research addresses the structural misalignment between the administrative and regulatory boundaries of coastal and marine areas and the inherently dynamic nature of the ecological processes that these boundaries are intended to govern. This phenomenon, defined in the literature as spatial mismatch, is interpreted not as a technical difficulty resolvable through specific regulatory adjustments, but as a crisis in the representation of territory, in which the conceptual, cartographic and regulatory tools of traditional planning are progressively inadequate to describe and manage the complexity of the environmental phenomena at play. The work proposes a conceptual paradigm shift: away from the metaphor of the boundary as a line of demarcation, towards a new ontology of the boundary understood as a moving threshold, a transition zone of variable thickness, permeable and redefinable over time in response to environmental transformations. On this theoretical basis, the research develops two complementary operational applications. The first, conducted in the Miramare Marine Protected Area, integrates multi-temporal analysis of satellite-derived vegetation indices with systematic conservation planning tools, assessing the coherence between existing regulatory structures and emerging ecological priorities over a twenty-five year period. The results reveal a progressive divergence between institutional boundaries and the effective distribution of ecological values, with the identification of conservation priority areas lacking any effective binding instrument. The second application, conducted in the Venice Lagoon, experiments with Satellite-Derived Bathymetry methodologies as a cognitive tool for the submerged dimension of the territory, demonstrating the potential of integrated approaches, combining optical remote sensing and geostatistical techniques, even in optically complex environments. Both case studies converge towards a proposal for adaptive planning, in which Earth Observation is configured as a knowledge infrastructure capable of producing updatable, temporally comparable and verifiable representations, essential for supporting informed decision-making processes.