The Marine biodiversity atlas of the Balearic Sea originates to provide the scientific community, public administration, consultancies and NGO's with a tool to easily acces the data on marine biodiversity collected by governmental agencies like the Spanish Oceanographic Institute. The Atlas has been developed based on data derived from the different research groups of the Balearic Oceanographic Centre with the information resulting from more than 40 years of marine investigations. Based on this information a dataset is constructed containing more than 90000 registers and integrating a high number of taxonomic groups: 33 phyla, 615 families, 1058 genera and around 1600 species found in the Balearic Islands context. The spacial data cover a sampled surface of roughly 150.000 km2. Objectives:

1. Assess the marine biodiversity of de Balearic Sea and determine the specific composition of the communities of target taxonomic groups in different biotops of the Balearic waters. 2. Design and implementation of a Marine Biodiversity Information System (SIBM) which allows the integration of the available information in a common georeferenced platform.