1st meeting of the CIGESMED Committee of External Advisors (CEA)
Marseille, 21 October 2014

Ready conclusions
The CEA members held closed-door discussion over the different topics. Preliminary assessments and recommendations from the committee are summarized as follow:
- General comment

• Whole scope of the project, particularly :
  • Increase of our Mediterranean marine biodiversity knowledge
  • Management oriented project
• Citizen science : high potential
• Challenge of designing a standardized protocol for the whole Mediterranean

- Suggestions from CEA

• Definition of the « coralligenous »
• More consistency in the terminology of GES^? : ecological ? environmental ? And related issues. Necessity to clarify the concepts in relation to the different EU directives.
• Standardization of the survey methodologies as much as possible, in order to achieve a comparable assessment
• Index-Cor : focus on Metric 1, as a way to solve the possible problem of species heterogeneity between basins and sample sizes
• Highlight the importance to design a new protocol (added value)
• Quantitative / Semi-quantitative evaluation of pressures, in order to validate the index in an independent way
• Citizen sciences : important to pay attention to training people + NGO’s involvement (be used as trainers as well) + summer school + to think about the continuation of the network (strategy to be developed for the post project period : for example COST action)
• Promotion of the initiative to other Mediterranean countries (collaboration with Spain, Italy, Northern Africa,…) and RAC SPA
• Clearly explicit the data availability at the beginning of the project in order to be able to discriminate the factors (climate change vs anthropogenic pressures)