Data Policy and Data Sharing Agreement in the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure

Data Policy and Data Sharing Agreement in the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructur

Benthic communities in three Mediterranean touristic ports: MAPMED project

Mediterranean ports are sources of significant economic activity and at the same time they act as recipients of considerable anthropogenic disturbance and pollution. Macrobenthic communities are an important component of the port biota and have been used as environmental quality indicators.Macrobenthic assemblages were recorded in three Mediterranean touristic ports under the framework of the ENPI CBC MED project MAPMED. Samples were collected from Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy), Heraklion (Crete, Greece) and El Kantaoui (Tunisia) ports during February, May and September 2012. The sampling stations were selected according to the different sectors within each port (i.e. leisure, fishing, passenger/cargo vessels, shipyard). A total number of 277 taxa belonging to 12 phyla were found, of which the 96 taxa were found in all three ports. El Kantaoui port hosted the highest number of macrobenthic taxa. Mollusca were the most abundant group (34%) in all ports. The highest percentage of opportunistic taxa per station was found before the touristic period in the shipyard of Heraklion port (89.3%)

EMODnet Workshop on mechanisms and guidelines to mobilise historical data into biogeographic databases

The objective of Workpackage 4 of the European Marine Observation and Data network (EMODnet) is to fill spatial and temporal gaps in European marine species occurrence data availability by carrying out data archaeology and rescue activities. To this end, a workshop was organised in the Hellenic Center for Marine Research Crete (HCMR), Heraklion Crete, (8–9 June 2015) to assess possible mechanisms and guidelines to mobilise legacy biodiversity data. Workshop participants were data managers who actually implement data archaeology and rescue activities, as well as external experts in data mobilisation and data publication. In particular, current problems associated with manual extraction of occurrence data from legacy literature were reviewed, tools and mechanisms which could support a semi-automated process of data extraction were explored and the re-publication of the data, including incentives for data curators and scientists were reflected upon