Résumé
Over the recent decades, the preservation of coastal and estuarine waters has been recognised as a priority at national and international levels. At the European scale, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) was established with the aim to achieve a good ecological status of all significant water bodies by the year 2015. Among the descriptors used to define the ecological status of water bodies, taxonomic diversity (usually species richness) is a widespread metric employed across taxa and habitats. However, species richness is known to increase with area at a decelerating rate, producing the species–area relationship (SAR). Thus, removing the effect of area (even in case of low magnitude), is mandatory before comparing species richness between sites. Here we tested recently developed multi-model SARs as a standardisation tool for comparing benthic species richness (annelids, arthropods, molluscs and total species richness) in 18 Italian coastal lagoons with a surface area ranging from 0.19 to 552km2, i.e. three orders of magnitude. However, the sampling effort was often incompletely described and certainly heterogeneous among the studies retrieved from the database. Therefore, we used the number of studies as a proxy for the sampling effort in each lagoon and estimated species richness from observed values using non-parametric occurrence-based estimators. We further corrected for bias that might be induced by sampling efforts being unrepresentative for the surface area of different lagoons. After applying these corrections, we estimated that c. 25–30% of species richness could be explained by surface area. We investigated the spatial congruence of species richness patterns across taxa and showed that molluscs could serve as a potential surrogate for total macro-invertebrate species richness. We further found that the intensity of conservation focus and the gradient of ecological status are decoupled in Italian coastal lagoons. More generally, our study pave the way for the use of flexible tools for the comparison of species richness across water bodies in the context of the WFD.