Coastal Environment Alterations and Sensory Landscape

Coastal environment, its natural world, and humans, are besides climate change effects subject to significant pressures by maritime-related, tourism, energy, aquaculture, and other sectors, all resulting in chemical pollution of all environmental components, noise pollution, and visual pollution. Humans attempt to adapt, mainly through devising and applying technological solutions. The senses incorporate the environment into the body and there is a mismatch between the way senses evolved and present surroundings, causing the disruption of visual acuity, smell, taste, and hearing. The disruptions to sensory landscape have thus altered the relationships between the organisms and the environment. The perceptual world or ‘umwelt’ differs for each organism. The impacts of environmental alterations to sensory landscape disrupt human sensory functioning, resulting in health impacts. Habitat disturbance in aquatic environments caused by acidification, contaminants, noise, optical degradation, elevated temperature, and electromagnetic fields can severely impact animal sensory biology. The paper focuses on sensory system responses of both humans and the wildlife to anthropogenically-induced and climate changes, reviews the issues resulting therefrom, and proposes solutions.