Like much of the Venetian plain, the Sile River’s course has undergone profound environmental, economic, and social transformations in recent years. These changes have led to increased anthropogenic pressures, compromising biodiversity and deteriorating the quality of water and protected habitats.

In this context, the Sile River Regional Natural Park has long been committed to safeguarding and managing the river’s valuable ecosystems. Between 2015 and 2019, the Park coordinated the LIFE SilIFFe project, which involved ecological research on the river’s quality, environmental restoration interventions, and the introduction of regulatory measures aimed at strengthening biodiversity protection.

However, there is a pressing need to carry out further investigations that the Park has not yet conducted to better guide future actions and ensure the long-term conservation of the Sile’s biodiversity. Additionally, there is still no long-term management and financial strategy to make conservation efforts more effective.

The PESBioSile project aims to monitor, preserve, enhance, and restore the biodiversity of the Sile River — from its springs to Quinto di Treviso — with a particular focus on identifying management solutions capable of generating environmental, social, and economic value.

Specifically, the PESBioSile project intends to:

• monitor the current ecological status of the Sile River in order to assess the impacts of the management and regulatory choices made by the Park to date;

• develop a catalogue of effective and innovative Nature-based Solutions (NBS) to safeguard biodiversity and mitigate human impacts;

• design sustainable and innovative economic mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) to finance priority interventions.

These objectives include the active involvement of key local stakeholders (e.g., farmers, fishers, aquaculture operators, and water users) in order to identify existing pressures and define shared solutions.

Within the PESBioSile project, Etifor will focus on two key aspects:

• Identifying the main anthropogenic pressures from various sectors (such as agriculture, recreational fishing, aquaculture, water management/withdrawal, and tourism) and defining a catalogue of management measures and Nature-based Solutions (NBS) to address these pressures in relation to the most relevant ecosystem services.

• Developing an economic strategy for implementing identified priority interventions by defining a PES (Payment for Ecosystem Services) financing strategy for biodiversity conservation within the Sile River Regional Natural Park. This activity will include a feasibility study on various PES alternatives and an experimental phase focusing on one selected PES approach.

Both the implementation of NBS and the application of PES represent highly innovative tools that will be tested for the first time in the Park area.