Within EUR-OCEANS, our major goal is to understand the vulnerability of all components of the Mediterranean and Black Sea pelagic ecosystems (from small unicellular organisms to large fish) to the global change and to produce models predicting the impact of these changes. A key element in this strategy are the observational sites driven by national programmes. On a national basis it would be difficult to understand the reaction and the adaptation of the Mediterranean ecosystem to the process of global change.

However, taken together the set of sites networked within EUR-OCEANS, these sites are treated as indicative ‘sensors’ since they are positioned in a) areas of variable productivity (from the Levantine Sea, an area of very low production, to the productive waters of the Alboran Sea), b) areas where climatic changes can affect water mass formation and thus productivity, c) strategic locations such as the Gibraltar strait, Sicily strait, Dardanelles strait etc.
In a few of these sites time-series of meteorological and oceanographic data are provided, e.g the DYFAMED site in the Ligurian Sea, the POSEIDON buoys system in the Aegean and Ionian Seas.