Introduction and Background

Our understanding of biodiversity, rate processes and long-term ecosystem change in deep-sea and extreme habitat sites is poor in comparison to shallow waters. This is equally true for soft and hard substrates. While Europe has several extreme habitat sites where long-term studies are taking place, the research at the various sites is not coordinated. In addition, the time series analyses are imperfect because of lack of expertise in certain taxa, which can only be solved by teams working at the pan-European level. Moreover, to identify long-term trends it is necessary to compare results at a number of deep-sea and shallow-water sites to identify whether the trends are really related to global change. DEEPSETS proposes to compare biodiversity information at a number of extreme locations, such as abyssal sediments, mud volcanoes, hydrothermal vents and sea caves and to compare this with results from similar temporal studies at MarBEF shallow-water sites.