Report of the Study Group on Biodiversity (SGBIODIV)

Despite the importance of biodiversity, as well as the legal and other requirements to protect the marine environment and regulate human impacts in the North Atlantic, Biodiversity Science has not traditionally been considered a core focus of the ICES community. In recent years, biodiversity issues have become an increasingly impor-tant element of ICES advisory work and biodiversity is one of the research topics identified in the ICES Science Plan as being of strategic importance to the advisory needs of ICES. The European Commission’s (EC) recent Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) also highlights the importance of marine biodiversity, and so re-quests for information from ICES on the monitoring, assessment and integration of biodiversity information will likely increase. Although a wide variety of ICES Expert Groups are involved in certain aspects of marine biodiversity, there has to date been little coordinated integration and synthesis of the information and advice they pro-duce.