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This is the English version of the informed consent that has been used for staekholder interactions. Similar forms have been used for focus groups and workshops.

Ten innovative EU projects to build ocean observation systems that provide input for evidence-based management of the ocean and the Blue Economy, have joined forces in the strong cluster ‘Nourishing Blue Economy and Sharing Ocean Knowledge’. Under the lead of the EuroSea project, the group published a joint policy brief listing recommendations for sustainable ocean observation and management. The cooperation is supported by the EU Horizon Results Booster and enables the group to achieve a higher societal impact. The policy brief will be presented to the European Commission on 15 October 2021. The ocean covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and provides us with a diverse set of ecosystem services that we cannot live without or that significantly improve our quality of life. It is the primary controller of our climate, plays a critical role in providing the air we breathe and the fresh water we drink, supplies us with a large range of exploitable resources (from inorganic resources such as sand and minerals to biotic resources such as seafood), allows us to generate renewable energy, is an important pathway for world transport, an important source of income for tourism, etc. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) evaluates the Blue Economy to currently represent 2.5% of the world economic value of goods and services produced, with the potential to further double in size by 2030 (seabed mining, shipping, fishing, tourism, renewable energy systems and aquaculture will intensify). However, the overall consequences of the intensification of human activities on marine ecosystems and their services (such as ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation, sea level rise, changing distribution and abundance of fish etc.) are still poorly quantified. In addition, on larger geographic and temporal scales, marine data currently appear fragmented, are inhomogeneous, contain data gaps and are difficult to access. This limits our capacity to understand the ocean variability and sustainably manage the ocean and its resources. Consequently, there is a need to develop a framework for more in-depth understanding of marine ecosystems, that links reliable, timely and fit-for-purpose ocean observations to the design and implementation of evidence-based decisions on the management of the ocean. To adequately serve governments, societies, the sustainable Blue Economy and citizens, ocean data need to be collected and delivered in line with the Value Chain of Ocean Information: 1) identification of required data; 2) deployment and maintenance of instruments that collect the data; 3) delivery of data and derived information products; and 4) impact assessment of services to end users. To provide input to the possible future establishment of such a framework, ten innovative EU projects to build user-focused, interdisciplinary, responsive and sustained ocean information systems and increase the sustainability of the Blue Economy, joined forces in a strong cluster to better address key global marine challenges. Under the lead of the EuroSea project, the group translated its common concerns to recommendations and listed these in the joint policy brief ‘Nourishing Blue Economy and Sharing Ocean Knowledge. Ocean Information for Sustainable Management.’. Following up on these recommendations will strengthen the entire Value Chain of Ocean Information and ensure sound sustainable ocean management. In this way, the 10 projects jointly strive to achieve goals set out in the EU Green Deal, the Paris Agreement (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the United Nations 2021-2030 Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Ocean Development. Toste Tanhua (GEOMAR), EuroSea coordinator: “It was great to collaborate with these other innovative projects and make joint recommendations based on different perspectives and expertise.”

From 2003 to 2013, the Ancona section of CNR-IRBIM (formerly part of CNR-Institute of Marine Science) runned the "Fishery Observing System" (FOS) program aimed at using Italian fishing vessels as Vessels Of Opportunity (VOOs) for the collection of scientifically useful datasets (Falco et al. 2007). Some commercial fishing vessels, targetting small pelagic species in the northern and central Adriatic Sea, were equipped with an integrated system for the collection of information on catches, position of the fishing operation, depth and water temperature during the haul, producing a great amount of data that demonstrated to be helpful both for oceanographic and fishery biology purposes (Carpi et al. 2015; Aydo?du et a. 2016; Sparnocchia et al. 2016; Lucchetti et al. 2018). In 2012, thanks to the participation to some national and international projects (e.g. SSD-Pesca, EU-FP7 JERICO etc.), CNR started the development of a new modular "Fishery & Oceanography Observing System" (FOOS; Patti et al. 2013). New sensors for oceanographic and meteorological data allow nowadays the FOOS to collect more parameters, with higher accuracy and to send them directly to a data center in near real time (Martinelli et al. 2016; Sparnocchia et al. 2017). Furthermore, the FOOS is a multifunction system able to collect various kind of data from the fishing operations and also to send back to the fishermen useful information (e.g. weather and sea forecasts, etc.) through an electronic logbook with an ad hoc software embedded. The new FOOS installed on various kind of fishing vessels targetting different resources, allowed a spatial extension of the monitored areas in the Mediterranean Sea (Patti et al. 2013). CNR-IRBIM implemented the "AdriFOOS" observational system, by installing the FOOS on some commercial fishing boats operating in the Adriatic Sea. Since then the datacenter based in Ancona receives daily data sets of environmental parameters collected along the water column and close to the sea bottom (eg. temperature, salinity, etc.), together with GPS haul tracks, catch amounts per haul, target species sizes and weather information. Some temperature and salinity measurements acquired by the FOOS in the Adriatic Sea from January 2014 to March 2015 were published within the JERICO project and some oxygen and fluorescence profiles obtained in 2017 within the NEXOS project. The dataset here presented contains 14803 depth/temperature profiles collected by 10 vessels of the AdriFOOS fleet in the period 2012-2020. All the profiles were subjected to quality control.Data are flagged according the L20 (SEADATANET MEASURAND QUALIFIER FLAGS).

Dataset supporting the publication "Multi-use of the sea: a wide array of opportunities from site-specific cases across Europe"

Widespread consensus has emerged around the importance of further agricultural intensification, if the nutritional requirements of the everexpanding global population are to be met (fao 2017). Mainstream models of agricultural intensification, closely linked to specialization, have proved to have a strong impact on the environment while also disconnecting agriculture from rural communities (Woods 2011; Primdahl and Swaffield 2010). Climate change and increasing urbanization pressures add urgency to the challenge of ensuring global food security without compromising the sustainability of social-ecological systems.

Release of the analysis notebook for the paper "Multi-use of the sea: a wide array of opportunities from site-specific cases across Europe".

Executive Summary The Common Fisheries Policy of the EU is currently implementing a landing obligation, which will require fishermen to land all catches that are subjected to catch limits (with some minor exemptions). This discard ban is to be fully implemented by 2019 and fishermen are currently struggling to see how they can meet with these requirements. The DiscardLess project is aimed at assisting the fishing industry to successfully adapt to the landing obligation. Work package 5 in the DiscardLess project focuses on providing stakeholders, such as fishermen and fishing vessel owners, with alternatives for on-board handling of the previously discarded catches. This report provides an overview of the work that has been done in task 5.4 in the DiscardLess project. The aim of that work has been to take suggested solutions from previous tasks in the work package on on-board handling of unwanted, unavoidable catches for four different fleet segments and present those solutions in 3D drawings, accompanied with a simple cost-benefit tool that allows stakeholders to estimate the economic feasibility of investing in the suggested solutions. The fleet segments selected represent a descriptive cross-section of European fisheries in terms of fleet composition and main challenges i.e. 11-meter coastal vessel, 23-meter Danish seiner/trawler, 39-meter bottom trawler and 50-meter bottom trawler. The 3D drawings and the cost-benefit tool have been made available at the DiscardLess webpage http://www.discardless.eu/tools which enables stakeholders, such as fishermen and fishing vessel owners, to see in a visual manner how the suggested solutions can be fitted on the vessels and whether or not investing in them is likely to give economic returns. The suggested solutions are first and foremost intended to provide fishermen with realistic alternatives for meeting the requirements of the landings obligation in Europe, as they are preparing for the implementation of the discard ban. The solutions do therefore need to be practical and economically feasible. Along with those suggestions we have also included recommendations for improved on-board handling technologies, which are expected to increase the value of catches regardless of the implementation of the landing obligation. The solutions focus largely on separating between the target catches and the unwanted catches, and in particular to provide alternatives for processing and storing under Minimum Reference Size Catches, which cannot be utilised for direct human consumption according to the landing obligation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy. Report Highlights Available alternatives for handling UUCs on-board fishing vessels is primarily dependant on the vessels size, catch composition and how long the vessel is out at sea in each fishing trip. Best practice on-board handling when it comes to bleeding, gutting, cleaning and chilling of all catches increases the potentials for making high value products from the raw materials. This applies for target catches and UUCs alike. Poorly handled or spoiled UUC have limited options for utilisation, even if it is not intended for human consumption. The EU fishing fleet consists of roughly 85 thousand vessels, of which 85% are small coastal vessels below 12 meters in length. There are very limited options for this fleet segment to handle UUCs in special way. The most applicable alternative is to keep UUCs in different coloured boxes, this has particularly to apply for the catches below MCRS and other raw materials that are not meant for human consumption. The larger the vessels are, the more alternatives become available for handling UUCs. The catches intended for human consumption can generally be handled as the target catches. It is only the catches intended for non-human consumption that need special attention. Differently coloured boxes/tubs, bulk storage, mincing, compression, silage preservation, Fish Protein Hydrolysate, Fish Protein Concentrate and fishmeal/fish oil production are amongst the available alternatives for utilising UUC on board vessels that have the space available. The methods/approaches followed: Suggested solutions from previous tasks in WP5 of the DiscardLess project on on-board handling of UUCs for four different fleet segments were drawn up in 3D and these drawings have been made available on the DiscardLess website, which allows stakeholders to see in a visual manner how solutions can be fitted on-board vessels. How these results can be used and by who? The 3D drawings, along with the cost-benefit tool that is now publicly available at the DiscardLess website will enable fish business operators, vessel owners, fishermen, policy makers and other stakeholders to better understand some of the available options that can be used for handling UUCs on-board fishing vessels and as results contribute to a successful implementation of the Landing obligation.

There is a growing international interest in studying the effects of ocean acidification on plankton communities that play a major role in the global carbon cycle and in the consumption of atmospheric CO2 via the so-called biological pump. Recently, several mesocosm experiments reported on the effect of ocean acidification on marine plankton communities, although the majority were performed in eutro- phic conditions or following nutrient addition. The objective of the present study was to perform two mesocosm experiments in the oligo- to meso-trophic Northwestern Mediterranean Sea during two seasons with contrasting environmental conditions: in summer 2012 in the Bay of Calvi (Corsica, France) and in winter 2013 in the Bay of Villefranche (France). This paper describes the objectives of these ex- periments, the study sites, the experimental set-up and the environmental and experimental conditions during the two experiments. The 20-day experiment in the Bay of Calvi was undoubtedly representative of summer conditions in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea with low nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations, warm waters and high surface solar irradiance. In contrast, the winter experiment, which was reduced to 12 days because of bad weather conditions, failed to reproduce the mesotrophic con- ditions typical of the wintertime in this area. Indeed, a rapid increase in phytoplankton biomass during the acidification phase led to a strong decrease in nitrate concentrations and an unrealistic N and P co- limitation at this period of the year. An overview of the 11 other papers related to this study and pub- lished in this special issue is provided. MEDiterranean Sea Acidification in a changing climate eFOCE

Social competence, the ability of individuals to regulate the expression of their social behaviour in order to optimize their social relationships in a group, is especially benefic for individuals living in complex social environments, and implies the ability to perceive social cues and produce appropriate behavioural output responses (Social Plasticity). Numerous examples of social competence can be found in nature, where individuals extract social information from the environment, and change their behavioural response based on the collected information. At the neuronal level, two major plasticity mechanisms have been proposed to underlie social plasticity, structural reorganization and biochemical switching of the neuronal networks underlying behaviour. The neural substrate for behavioural plasticity has been identified as the social decision-making (SDM) network, such that the same neural circuitry may underlie the expression of different behaviours depending on social context. The goal of this work is to study the proximate mechanism underlying behavioural flexibility in the context of experience-dependent behavioural shifts, in an integrative framework. For this purpose we exposed male zebrafish to two types of social interactions: (1) real-opponent interactions, from which a Winner and Loser emerged; and (2) Mirror-elicited interactions, that produced individuals that did not experience a change in social status, despite expressing similar levels of aggressive behaviour to those participating in real-opponent fights. In a first set of experiments, we studied the influence of neuromodulators on social plasticity mechanisms, by characterizing the endocrine response to social challenges, as well as the social modulation of brain monoamines and nonapeptides. Next we tested the SDM network hypothesis by contrasting changes in functional localization vs. connectivity across this network. Finally we characterized changes in expression of key genes for different neuroplasticity mechanisms in response to changes in social status. Our research suggests different social plasticity mechanisms underlying Winners and Losers both at physiological and molecular levels, for Mirror-fighters, where the experience of winning or losing was decoupled for the fighting experience, few changes were detected. This, by itself suggests a pivotal role of social perception in triggering shifts between socially driven behavioural states. Tese de doutoramento, Biologia (Etologia), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015