Coastal marine environment is a complex system and its management requires adequate information.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are considered pilot sites useful to define innovative tools for the Integrated
Coastal Zone Management (ICZM). Their management however requires acquaintance with the
relationships between the protected site and the status of the coastal neighbouring areas in order to assess
mutual effects and influences. There is the need of monitoring systems capable of highlighting physical
and biological phenomena, and possible oceanographic anomalies at local scale, to assess possible existing
differences between MPAs and their neighbouring unprotected zones. The present study proposes an
integrated analysis of data sets coming from in situ and remote-sensing data to evaluate the reliability
of satellite sensors for coastal zone monitoring and to better understand the short-term environmental
dynamics on a coastal area centred on the Portofino MPA (Ligurian Sea)