The alterations and destruction of habitats (indiscriminate removal of vegetation cover, installation of infrastructures, alterations of the hydrogeological cycle), have caused habitat fragmentation, reducing it to residual bastions that still subsist in the SCI of the Southwest Coast.
The activities that may somehow cause alteration to the hydrological system are particularly harmful, since these change the duration and/or frequency of the flooding and dry periods. The isolation and fragmentation of this habitat increases its vulnerability to anthropic pressures and to stochastic phenomena.
The destruction of the MTP has been undergoing at an increasingly accelerated pace in the last two decades, causing its fragmentation and reducing of habitat’s connectivity, which is aggravated by the fact that the MTP's are located in private land. This lack of connectivity will result in a medium-term disappearance of fragments representing the considered habitats and eventually in the local extinctions of metapopulations of flora and fauna.
The isolation between some MTP’s, or between MTP’s Cores/Groups within the SCI of the Southwest Coast, is even more notorious in the Odemira municipality, especially in the area of Irrigation Perimeter of Mira and it will have repercussions in the flora and fauna associated to this habitat.