Since the adoption of the Habitats and Birds Directives by EU governments, marine Natura 2000 (N2K) sites have been established in the European Mediterranean Sea, creating one of the largest international networks of protected areas. Nevertheless, to date, marine N2K sites are generally scarcely implemented, studied and monitored, and thus their management effectiveness is weak, and their environmental status is often unknown....

Implementing effective marine monitoring to detect and track ecosystem shifts, biodiversity alteration, and habitat loss is one of the most crucial challenges to meet the objectives set out by the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework and by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The lack of coordinated and harmonized monitoring frameworks at different spatial scales and their weakness in accounting for ecological proces...

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Biological and Ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (BioEco EOVs) are two cooperative conceptual frameworks which help harmonize and process multi-source marine biodiversity observations into robust indexes, in order to measure progress toward policy conservation goals. Long-term monitoring networks are encouraged to contribute to these frameworks by mobilizing historical times series...

This work presents a practical case study of the Open Science principles applied to the valorization of a long-term marine dataset collected in the Northern Adriatic Sea, one of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites of the LTER-Italy network. The dataset covers a temporal range of 50 years (1965–2015), and it is composed of abiotic, and phyto- and zooplankton data, for a total of 21 parameters. The case study involved...