ELNAIS: A collaborative network on Aquatic Alien Species in Hellas (Greece)

ELNAIS is a dynamic online information platform aiming to collect and report spatial information on Aquatic Alien Species in Greek waters. It covers freshwater, marine and estuarine waters, including not only established aliens but also casual records and cryptogenic species. The ELNAIS system includes: News, List of Greek experts, Literature of findings in Greece, List of species with information on their first introduction date and source as well as photos and distribution maps. Data providers are the scientific community (publications, grey literature, and databases) as well as citizen scientists. ELNAIS provides a useful tool towards national obligations and commitments under both the European and global frameworks in respect to Non Indigenous Species (CBD, WFD, MSFD).JRC.H.1-Water Resource

A MSFD complementary approach for the assessment of pressures, knowledge and data gaps in Southern European Seas : the PERSEUS experience

PERSEUS project aims to identify the most relevant pressures exerted on the ecosystems of the Southern European Seas (SES), highlighting knowledge and data gaps that endanger the achievement of SES Good Environmental Status (GES) as mandated by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). A complementary approach has been adopted, by a meta-analysis of existing literature on pressure/impact/knowledge gaps summarized in tables related to the MSFD descriptors, discriminating open waters from coastal areas. A comparative assessment of the Initial Assessments (IAs) for five SES countries has been also independently performed. The comparison between meta-analysis results and IAs shows similarities for coastal areas only. Major knowledge gaps have been detected for the biodiversity, marine food web, marine litter and underwater noise descriptors. The meta-analysis also allowed the identification of additional research themes targeting research topics that are requested to the achievement of GES. 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.peer-reviewe

Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status

Assessing the environmental status of marine ecosystems is useful when communicating key messages to policy makers or the society, reducing the complex information of the multiple ecosystem and biodiversity components and their important spatial and temporal variability into manageable units. Taking into account the ecosystem components to be addressed(e.g., biological, chemical, physical), the numerous biodiversity elements to be assessed(e.g., from microbes to sea mammals), the different indicators needed to be studied(e.g., in Europe, 56 indicators of status have been selected), and the different assessment scales to be undertaken(e.g., from local to regional seascale), some criteria to define spatial scales and some guidance on aggregating and integrating information is needed. We have reviewed, from ecological and management perspectives, the approaches for aggregating and integrating currently available for marine status assessment in Europe and other regions of the world. Advantages and shortcomings of the different alternatives are highlighted. We provide some guidance on the steps toward defining rules for aggregation and integration of information at multiple levels of ecosystem organization, providing recommendations on when using specific rules in the assessment. A main conclusion is that any integration principle used should be ecologically-relevant, transparent and well documented, in order to make it comparable across different geographic regions.publishedVersio

Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status

Assessing the environmental status of marine ecosystems is useful when communicating key messages to policymakers or the society, reducing the complex information of the multiple ecosystem and biodiversity components and their important spatial and temporal variability into manageable units. Taking into account the ecosystem components to be addressed (e.g. biological, chemical, physical), the numerous biodiversity elements to be assessed (e.g. from microbes to sea mammals), the different indicators needed to be studied (e.g. in Europe, 56 indicators of status have been selected), and the different assessment scales to be undertaken (e.g. from local to regional sea scale), some criteria to define spatial scales and some guidance on aggregating and integrating information is needed. We have reviewed, from ecological and management perspectives, the approaches for aggregating and integrating currently available for marine status assessment in Europe and other regions of the world. Advantages and shortcomings of the different alternatives are highlighted. We provide some guidance on the steps towards defining rules for aggregation and integration of information at multiple levels of ecosystem organization, providing recommendations on when using specific rules in the assessment. A main conclusion is that any integration principle used should be ecologically-relevant, transparent and well documented, in order to make it comparable across different geographic regions.JRC.H.1-Water Resource

Indicator-based assessment of marine biological diversity–lessons from 10 case studies across the European Seas

The Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires the environmental status of European marine waters to be assessed using biodiversity as one out of 11 descriptors, but the complexity of marine biodiversity and its large span across latitudinal and salinity gradients have been a challenge to the scientific community aiming to produce approaches for integrating information from a broad range of indicators. The Nested Environmental status Assessment Tool (NEAT), developed for the integrated assessment of the status of marine waters, was applied to ten marine ecosystems to test its applicability and compare biodiversity assessments across the four European regional seas. We evaluate the assessment results as well as the assessment designs of the ten cases, and how the assessment design, particularly the choices made regarding the area and indicator selection, affected the results. The results show that only 2 out of the 10 case study areas show more than 50 % probability of being in good status in respect of biodiversity. No strong pattern among the ecosystem components across the case study areas could be detected, but marine mammals, birds, and benthic vegetation indicators tended to indicate poor status while zooplankton indicators indicated good status when included into the assessment. The analysis shows that the assessment design, including the selection of indicators, their target values, geographical resolution and habitats to be assessed, has potentially a high impact on the result, and the assessment structure needs to be understood in order to make an informed assessment. Moreover, recommendations are provided for the best practice of using NEAT for marine status assessments