Strengthening Europe's Capability in Biological Ocean Observations

This publication is primarily aimed at stakeholders involved in ocean observing, spanning diverse roles from commissioning, managing, funding and coordinating, to developing, implementing, or advising on, ocean observation programmes. Such programmes will have strategic and policy drivers but their main purpose may vary from predominantly researchdriven scientific purposes to environmental monitoring for providing data and reporting to legally-binding regulations or directives. The main focus is on European capabilities but set in a global context with the various actors spanning a variety of geographical scales from national to regional and European. Key stakeholder organizations include environmental or other agencies; marine research institutions, their researchers and operators; international and regional ocean observing initiatives and programmes; national, regional and European policy makers and their advisors; national stations for observations; etc.). It will also be of interest to the wider marine and maritime research and policy community. The main aim of the publication is to increase the relevance of current (and future) European biological ocean observation capacity to strengthen global efforts towards our understanding of the ocean and enhance marine biodiversity conservation, for maintaining a healthy ocean for healthy societies. This document explains why biological ocean observations are needed to assess progress against national and international conservation targets, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Blue Growth agenda and to contribute to key EU directives including the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). To achieve this, the publication highlights the need of biological ocean observations to reflect clearly defined hypotheses about potential causes of change, including the combined impacts of local and global drivers, and to support the management of our impacts on the ocean. Additionally, it calls for flexible biological ocean observing programmes to capture the relevant drivers operating at multiple spatial scales, by networking and integration of ongoing monitoring programmes, methodological standardization and appropriate policies of data integration and dissemination. It then presents key variables, elements and information products to inform on the status and trends of marine biodiversity.