Funded by ERANet Mar-TERA over 2018-2021, the European SEAMoBB project brings together a consortium of three academic partners and two companies in France, Italy and Spain, with the aim of implementing a protocol for monitoring the benthic marine biodiversity of Mediterranean rocky habitats. It involves scientists from a variety of disciplines.
The aim is to combine scientific knowledge and practical tools to overcome the three barriers that prevent the development of marine monitoring networks for benthic habitats in general (barriers 1 and 3), and for hard bottoms in particular (barrier 2):
- establish justification rules based on connectivity models to determine the network of sites to be monitored,
- find solutions to standardise hard-bottom sampling, and
- find solutions to automate and standardise the assessment of species composition.
The partners are combining physical oceanography, population genetics and community ecology to monitor twenty-eight sites in the western Mediterranean. By comparing methods for estimating connectivity, standardised sampling structures and species composition, cost-effective protocols for long-term monitoring will be developed.