Report of the Working Group on Biodiversity (WGBIODIV)

Biodiversity has become an increasingly important element of ICES’ work and is one of the research topics identified in the ICES Science Plan as being of strategic impor-tance to the advisory needs of ICES. The European Commission’s (EC) recent Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) also highlights the importance of marine bio-diversity, and so requests for information from ICES on the monitoring, assessment and integration of biodiversity information will likely increase in the future. A range of ICES Expert Groups are currently involved in particular aspects of marine biodi-versity, and WGBIODIV aims to provide the ICES community with an improved ca-pacity to coordinate integration and synthesis of biodiversity information.