From 22 - 25 January, the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), hosted the PERSEUS Umbrella Workshop & 1ST General Assembly Meeting. The scientists, from over 20 countries around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, met in Barcelona last week to share the results of their joint work carried out over this past year and summarized both on a regional and basin scale, the environmental stressors on which the PERSEUS research will focus over the next three years.

To gain an overall perspective on both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea the Umbrella Workshop was organised according to the 4 SES regions: East, Central, West Mediterranean and Black Sea.

Through 4 parallel sessions, all relevant issues for each WP were selected and compiled accordingly for each region, with the aim to create a list of priority issues relevant to the risk of not achieving Good Environmental Status (GES) by 2020. Furthermore, regarding the indicators used and their relevance to GES, the scientific results achieved so far were highlighted, while the points addressing the 11 descriptors were considered. The pressures and impacts related to natural and/or socio-economic issues were highlighted, especially in respect to the lack of spatio-temporal coverage of data sources. The data and knowledge gaps that will be filled throughout PERSEUS’s lifetime, for each region, were summarized, while a high priority list with the risks, for the gaps that will not be filled under the PERSEUS workframe, was also created.

 The organisation of the PERSEUS Umbrella Workshop was under the responsibility of the PERSEUS Regional Coordinators: Dr. Javier Ruiz (Western Mediterranean), Dr. Alessandro Crise (Central Mediterranean, including the Adriatic Sea), Dr. Eleni Kaberi (Eastern Mediterranean), Dr. Andrei Zatsepin (Black Sea), in cooperation with the PESEUS Management Office.