Paolo Accadia is a fishery economist with around 20 years of professional experience. He works for NISEA since 2013. He worked for more than ten years for IREPA (Economic Research Institute for Fishery and Aquaculture) first as researcher and then director of the research unit. He was also research associate at CEMARE, Centre for the Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources, University of Portsmouth (UK). He has a long experience in socio-economic analysis of Italian and Mediterranean fisheries. In the last years, his research activities have been mainly directed to the development of bio-economic models and the evaluation of management measures for the fishing sector. He has been involved, in some cases as scientific responsible, in several research projects and studies funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policy and the European Commission. Since 2003, he has participated in the programme for the collection, management and use of data in the fisheries and aquaculture sectors (programme adopted for the period 2017-2019 through the Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2016/1251) by carrying out activities related to the collection, processing and analysis of Italian fishing fleet data. He collaborated in several EU funded projects, like BEMMFISH (Bio-economic modelling of Mediterranean fisheries), EFIMAS (Operational evaluation tools for fisheries management options), COBECOS (Costs and benefits of control strategies), SOCIOEC (Socio Economic effects of management measures of the future CFP) and MINOUW (Science, Technology, and Society Initiative to minimize Unwanted Catches in European Fisheries). He worked in a number of EU studies, like ESIF (Energy saving in fisheries), “Survey of existing bio-economic models”, “Remuneration of spawning stock biomass”, and BEMTOOL (Bio-Economic Modelling TOOLs). He has participated in several STECF (Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries) working groups of the European Commission.

Silvia Angelini. Fishery biologist, PhD in Biodiversity and Evolution, researcher of the Institute for Marine Biological Resources and Biotechnologies (IRBIM) of Italian National Research Council (CNR) at Ancona (Italy). She is principally involved in producing stock assessments for small pelagic and demersal species; the results of these assessments are presented at various international management fora (FAO-GFCM, STECF). She has experience in using both simple single species stock assessment models that more complex models; during her PhD she developed expertise for developing models regarding the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. She is also involved in the Italian data collection framework for the EU, collecting and analyzing fishery and biological data for the most important commercial species of the Adriatic Sea. She is also part of a team that carries out yearly towed underwater TV surveys aimed at estimating the abundance of Norway lobster living in the Central Adriatic Sea.

Norbert Billet currently holds a permanent engineer position at the LHM unit within UMR MARBEC in Sète. He joined Ifremer in 2018. His work focuses on the data processing of biological data collected through the DCF and other monitoring programs.

Isabella Bitetto. She holds a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics on stochastic discrete time models (University of Bari, Italy). She has 10 years of experience in fisheries science and in international and national projects. Since 2009, she has a permanent position as researcher at COISPA and she is involved in the activities carried out under the EU DCF. She is the developer of the RoME routine for data quality checks of MEDITS trawl survey data. She has participated in the STECF-SGMED-EWG working groups since 2010 to date and in the development of fish population models and modelling using GLM, GAM, GAMM. Good skills in programming and using several stock assessment models, highly structured and data limited, including methods for Management Strategy Evaluation. She also works with preference modelling (e.g. Multi Criteria Decision Analysis – MCDA) and she is the developer of the bio-economic BEMTOOL model. She participated in MARE/2014/19, she is co-developer of R routines on optimization of biological sampling and the developer of data quality checks routines of STREAM project (MARE2016/22. SI2.770115). She has developed new tools for disaggregating economic data at the same resolution of transversal data in the SECFISH project (MARE2016/22. SI2.768889). She participated to ICES WKBIOPTIM3 working group on optimization of biological sampling. Co-chair of the forthcoming WKBIOPTIM4.

Pierluigi Carbonara. PhD in sea environmental protection (University of Siena, Italy). He has a permanent position as senior researcher at COISPA since 1994. His focus are: fishery biology, growth, population dynamics, fish physiology, gears selectivity, fish welfare. In particular his activity is on: age reading in fish (otoliths, spines, vertebrae etc.); analysis of sex and maturity stage in fish, crustacean and cephalopods; statistical analysis, LFDs analysis; fish tagging; age validation. He conducted several trawl surveys, discard and landing sampling projects on different commercial fishery fleets (small scale, trawl, purse seine, long lines, driftnet). He is involved in the Data Collection Programmes since 2002 and he is responsible of the fishery dependent Data Collection in GSA19 and trawl survey in GSA10 (2013-2016). He is author/co-author of several scientific publications and is member of some working groups on age determination. He has participated to international groups on otoliths reading and age estimation and validation he is currently co-chair of the ICES WG BIOP.

Paola Carrara. She is a researcher of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), active in the Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA), unit of Milan. Her scientific activity regards designing and managing information systems. Her main interests are in (Fuzzy) Information Retrieval, spatio-temporal archives of images, architectures, technologies and standards for geographic information on the Internet, in particular Web geoservices and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). In the years 2006-2008 she was responsible of the Italian branch of the project IDE-Univers which created the first European Spatial Data Infrastructure in the research field. She has been coordinator of the FP7/Space Project DORIS_Net (2011-2013), aimed at developing a European Platform of Regional Contact Offices (RCO) to foster the creation of GMES/Copernicus downstream services. She has been coordinator of the SubProject 7 (SP7) of RITMARE, flagship project of the Italian Ministry of University and Research, the leading national marine research project for the period 2012-2018; the goal of SP7 is to create the interoperable infrastructure for the observation network and marine data of RITMARE (http://www.ritmare.it/sp7). In RITMARE SP7 she coordinates a R&D group that has designed and developed GET-IT Starter Kit (www.get-it.it), an open source and free software suite allowing researchers to easily share maps, measurements, and sensors, by creating autonomous data distribution standard web services. She is now technical responsible for the IT aspects of the newly created web site and database of DCF Network within the Agreement DSSTTA-IREA, collecting Italian fishery data within the Workplan PLNRDA 2017-2019 (http://150.146.207.152/web/). She published papers in international and national Journals, in books and at Conferences in the topics of her research.

Loredana Casciaro. PhD in Mediterranean Agronomics (Bari University, Italy). Permanent position as researcher at COISPA since 2008. She is involved in DCF since the beginning of her activity at COISPA and is coordinating the operative modules of data collection and validation for the metier-related and stock-related variables, research surveys at sea and evaluation of the effects of the fishing sector on the marine ecosystem for the GSA10, GSA18 and GSA19. She is also involved in laboratory analysis of the biological samplings and fish ageing. She has contributed to the development of the FishTrawl platform for the archive, processing, analysis and elaboration of trawl survey data. She works with routines and scripts in R environment.

Grégoire Certain currently holds a permanent researcher position at the LHM unit within UMR MARBEC in Sète. He joined Ifremer in 2017. His scientific work focuses on the monitoring of marine and coastal communities and on their spatio-temporal dynamics. His monitoring actions includes the scientific coordination of MEDITS and INPOLAG surveys, focusing respectively the demersal fishes of the Gulf of Lion and juveniles fishes in the Mediterranean lagoons. He also leads projects aiming at strengthening the monitoring of the coastal Octopus vulgaris stocks and fisheries. His modelling research attempt to develop a MICE model for the Gulf of Lion. Operationally, GC is involved in stock assessment for the Mediterranean Sea at the GFCM level, as well as in the evaluation the ecological consequences of the current management plan targeting demersal trawlers in the western Mediterranean.

Dr. Ioannis Chamodrakas is a member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He studied Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and received his degree in 1999. He continued his studies at the postgraduate level at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens, from which he received a Master’s Degree in Advanced Information Systems in 2003 and a PhD in Informatics in 2009. He has participated in a large number of European and national research programs at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Athens University of Economics and Business since 1998. His research work focuses on Algorithm Engineering with Applications in Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Recommender Systems and Bioinformatics. He has authored 7 papers in leading and internationally recognized scientific journals and 10 publications in proceedings of international and national peer reviewed scientific conferences. His published work has received over 1000 citations with a Hirsch index equal to 7. He has served in the program committee of many international scientific conferences and has contributed as a reviewer to numerous international scientific journals and conferences (IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, etc.).

Dimitrios Damalas holds a a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, an MSc and PhD in Biological Oceanography. He currently holds a principal researcher post at IMBRIW/HCMR. He has a multidisciplinary background (mathematics, informatics, statistics, marine biology, fisheries science) and has been involved in diverse topics: fisheries management, population dynamics, elasmobranch biology; Data Collection; stakeholder perception and EU policies; mapping of essential fish habitats; fisheries control & enforcement; MPA management. During his 22 years of involvement he has participated in more than 20 competitive projects and as of today has published 47 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is currently a permanent member of the EU Scientific Technical and Economic Committee on Fisheries (STECF).

Marilena Donnaloia. PhD in Biosciences and methodologies for health (Bari University, Italy). She is collaborating with COISPA since 2010 and since then is involved in the biological samplings and trawl survey in the Data Collection Framework. Since 2015 she has a permanent position as researcher at COISPA, where she is responsible of the Laboratory of Ichthyology and Marine Ecology (LIME). Her focus is on studies on growth, fish condition, reproduction, life cycles and trophic ecology of various species. Biological and biochemical assays.

Fabio Fiorentino. Fishery biologist, PhD in marine environmental science, senior researcher of the Institute for Marine Biological Resources and Biotechnologies (IRBIM) of Italian National Research Council (CNR) at Mazara del Vallo (Italy). Specialist in biology and ecology of fishery resources and strategies for the sustainable exploitation of marine renewable resources. Responsible of research projects on fishery data collection, stock assessment and management of fishery resources in the Mediterranean. Member of national and international working groups dealing with sustainable fishing strategies. Coordinator of the Sub Committee on Stock Assessment of the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) of the General Fisheries Commission of the Mediterranean (GFCM) from 2010 to 2013. Italian National Focal Point for the FAO Regional Project MedSudMed. Author of 78 scientific papers in ISI journals and several articles and technical reports on the Mediterranean fisheries.

Stefanos Kavadas, is a mathematician, senior Assistant Researcher focusing on fisheries science. Since 1992 holds a position at IMBRIW/HCMR. He has a wide experience on aspects related to fisheries data management and analysis. He is responsible for the fisheries data center, for the National Data bases of the Data Collection Framework, for the MSFD fisheries data base and for the implementation of the GFCM/DCRF. He research interests focus on: design and development fisheries databases, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), VMS analysis, classical and advanced statistical analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis, and geostatistical models. He has been also involved in studies on small scale fisheries and the development of methodologies for the analysis and modelling of effort data from different fisheries sectors. He is the president of the SC of Med & BS RDB and member of the GFCM Working Group for deep-water red shrimp (WGDWRS). He has participated in more than 70 national and international projects and has authored/co-authored 77 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and conference proceedings.

Kourantidou Melina. She holds a PhD in marine resource economics and management from the University of Southern Denmark. She is a newly appointed researcher at IMBRIW, HCMR and holds international research experience working with fisheries economics, management and governance. She has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her long-term research interests include interdisciplinary approaches that apply economic theory and methods to improve marine resource management and ensure resilient communities and ecosystems. She has worked with fisheries in data-poor settings and has applied tools ranging from bioeconomic analysis to the development of indicators.

Maria Laiaki holds a bachelor’s degree in Geology and Geoenvironment, a MSc in Atmospheric and Geological environment for infrastructure design. She currently holds a position of Research assistant in the Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters (IMBRIW) of HCMR since 2013. Among her research fields are: Data Collection, fisheries management, mapping of essential fish habitats, MPA management, exploration and exploitation of mineral and energy resources, geological engineering, geological mapping, geophysics, applied geophysics methods. She is responsible for building and maintaining GIS databases and utilizing the GIS software to analyze the spatial and non-spatial information in the databases. She has taken part in numerous scientific researches and studies in Greece.

Giuseppe Lembo. He has more than 25 years of experience in the field of stock assessment, fishery management, telemetry and spatial distribution/dynamics, fish behaviour and fish welfare. Currently, he holds the position of legal representative of COISPA. He has participated to several EC-funded and national research projects and he is the author/co-author of several scientific publications. During his career, he has been member of Scientific Committees and working groups of Italian Ministry of Agriculture Policy, Italian Society of Marine Biology – SIBM, European Commission, European Aquaculture Society – EAS, FAO and IFOAM. He has been acting as chair of the Expert Group for Technical advice on Organic Production (EGTOP), of the European Commission, from 2010 to 2014. He has coordinated the European Project SAMED “Stock assessment and production of demersal resources in the Mediterranean”, which involved several European Research Institutes. (2000-02) and has participated to several specific projects of the MAREA Framework, coordinating the specific project SEDAF (Specific Contract No 10, SI2.666117, Improved knowledge of the main socio-economic aspects related to the most important fisheries in the Adriatic Sea). He is involved in the Data Collection Programmes since 2002 and responsible of the Data Collection Framework in GSA18.

Alessandro Ligas. He holds a Master Degree in Biological Sciences and a PhD in Marine Ecology (University of Pisa, Italy). He has 15 years of experience in fisheries science and international and national projects. Since 2002, he is involved in the activities carried out under the EU DCF. His research focuses on the biology and population dynamics of marine fish and shellfish stocks to provide scientific advice on stocks and fisheries of commercial and ecological importance. From 2012 to 2014, he has worked as project leader (Senior Scientific Officer) at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI), Belfast, UK, responsible for the design and implementation of appropriate data collection programmes in support of the assessment and management of fisheries in the Irish Sea. Currently, he holds the position of researcher at CIBM, and he is STECF member. He has been the chairman (2016-2018) of the GFCM Working Group on Stock Assessment of Demersal species (WGSAD) in the Mediterranean Sea, and has a decadal experience in participating to ICES and STECF expert working groups. He has been the scientific coordinator of the EU funded projects STREAM and RECFISH.

Irida Maina is a fisheries scientist (Ph.D) and a geographer (M.Sc., B.Sc) and from 2011 works as a research assistant in the Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters (IMBRIW) of HCMR. Her research interests focus on: 1) the analysis and modeling of fishing activity in order to estimate fishing effort, to identify important fishing grounds and areas of high discarding, 2) exploring the spatiotemporal dynamics of fishing effort, as well as, 3) developing and applying methods for contributing to the improvement of the Marine Spatial Planning process within an overall ecosystem-based marine spatial management framework. She has participated in 18 European/National research projects (eg. BENTHIS, PERSEUS, MED_UNITS, i4Sea) and she has contributed in 16 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as, more than 30 other publications (i.e., conference proceedings, technical reports).

Loretta Malvarosa is a fishery economist with more than 20 years of experience on the national and international field. She has a degree in economics and a specialization in fishery economics acquired directly on the field. She is working for NISEA since 2013. She has worked mainly in Italy, being involved in the National Programmes for the collection, management and use of data in the fisheries sector since 2005 and at European level, being involved in a number of EU funded projects under the 5th, 6th and 7th Framework Programmes and under H2020 projects. She is mainly specialized on the collection and analysis of data for the fishery and for the fish processing sectors, evaluation of economic performances of the fishery fleets, impact assessment and cost-benefit analysis, analysis of the sectorial interdependencies (I/O tables), value chain analysis. As far as the Italian data collection, she is involved in the estimation of: capital value and costs, employment data, number of enterprises of the Italian fleet; she coordinates the data collection for the fish processing sector; she is involved in the implementation and management of databases (NIBAT and NITRA), ad hoc implemented by NISEA to ease the reply to data request, including official data calls (DGMARE, DCRF, etc…). She regularly attends PGECON meetings. Since 2009 to 2019 she has been member of the Scientific, Technical and Economic committee for Fisheries, consultancy body of the European Commission (DG-MARE).

Mantopoulou – Palouka Danai holds a Master’s degree in Applied and Computational Mathematics and she is a phd candidate in Machine Learning applications in Population Dynamics. She holds a position as a contract researcher in the Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters (IMBRIW) of HCMR since 2013. She has been involved in Data Collection Framework (DCF) since 2013 as a Data Analyst. She has experience in management of fisheries and especially in Stock Assessment through her involvement in various STECF meetings since 2017 as well as GFCM and ICCAT. She has participate in 4 projects and she has published 5 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Michela Martinelli. Technologist – Degree in Marine Biology and Oceanography (2004), Doctoral degree in Marine Biology and Ecology (2010). Collaboration with CNR Ancona since 2006, Technologist since 2009. Earlier research fields: taxonomy, zoology and ecology of benthic organisms; then involved in development of a database on Italian and EU fishery and environment legislation and in training for Italian Coast Guards on fishery control. Nowadays mainly dealing with coastal zone management programs and coordinator of technical and scientific programs in national and international projects (FOS-FOOS, AdriFOOS, UWTV). Support for research activities, in the field of environmental and fisheries monitoring, stock assessment and modeling, including technical-scientific support to decision-making authorities. Building and management of databases of different nature (e.g. fisheries, sampling, oceanographic data) by Geographic Information Systems. Experience in the construction of databases, treatment and processing of data collected for the evaluation of marine resources through scientific surveys and biological sampling of commercial catches (also within Italian DFC). Tutoring and teaching activities (e.g. Phd tutor for Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna, thesis correlator at Polytech University of Marche).

Andrea Massaro. Master Degree in Marine Biology (University of Pisa, Italy). His research activity mainly focuses on the biology and population dynamics of commercial fish stocks. In particular, he gained expertise in ageing and growth determination of demersal and small pelagic species, and reproductive biology of fish and shellfish. Since 2010, he is involved in the activities carried out under DCF in the GSA9. He is member of ICES working groups on age reading and validation, and age-data quality evaluation.

Claudia Musumeci. She holds a Master Degree in Marine Biology (University of Pisa, Italy.) She is expert in fishery data management, processing and analysis. She works also with bio-economic and population dynamics models, and spatial-temporal analysis. Since 2010, she is involved in the Data Collection Framework (DCF) activities in the FAO-GFCM GSA9. Currently, she holds a position as junior scientist at CIBM.

Ioannis Ntokos holds a University Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the Polytechnical Department of the University of Patras since 1994. He is employed since March 1996 at the Hellenic Centre of Marine Research (HCMR). He is an expert programmer in Delphi , C, Visual Basic, JAVA, Python, Javascript, HTML, JOOMLA. He have worked with the DJANGO framework for Python and the STRUTS framework for JAVA, is an expert in website design and have constructed websites for various projects the center is involved in. He also have expert knowledge on database design and implementation with good knowledge of ORACLE, MySQL and Paradox DB systems, good knowledge on Geonetwork and Geoserver systems involving web based GIS design. He participated in the design and constructed the Medits Database (MDMS project) for the MEDITS EU project, also worked on various tasks like data analysis, checking data integrity, data collection. He also participated in many national and EU projects like IMAS-FISH, MESMA, Fishboat, EPILEXIS.

Carlo Paolucci. Degree studies in Political Science (political economics) and a master’s degree in philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, he did research activity in the field of economic development for the Centre for Labour Economics and Political Economics (CELPE) and Department of Economics and Statistics (DISES) of the University of Salerno. He works as research data analyst at Nisea since 2016. Over the years he has deepened his knowledge of geographic information system (GIS) and data management software and he has participated in various territorial development research projects with public, private and third sector entities. He is involved in the programme for the collection, management and use of data in the fisheries and aquaculture sectors (programme adopted for the period 2017-2019 through the Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2016/1251) in which he carried out research support activities, interfacing with the data collectors in the Italian landing ports. He has also implemented the database NIBAT which contains all the information collected and statistical processing of Nisea researchers and that allows, through the use of specially created macros, to process the outputs for the main European and Italian data calls.

Dimitris Politikos holds a BSc in Mathematical Modelling in Physical Sciences and PhD in Marine Ecosystem Modelling (National Technical University of Athens). He is currently a Research Associate at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. His research focuses on the development of mathematical and computational models, with the aim of understanding how climate variability and the human interferences act upon on small pelagic species, evaluating existing and alternative fishing strategies for better management of fish stocks, and exploring the transport of floating marine litter in the oceans. Recently, as a member of the Fisheries team of HCMR, he developed the fprmcda – R package for visualizing fishing pressure for small and medium scale coastal fisheries in R. fprmcda combines the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and geospatial techniques to quantify the synergistic effect of influential components (e.g., bathymetry, distance from coast, Chla concentration, fishing effort, marine traffic activity, vessel capacity of ports, etc.) on defining fishing footprint. He has also participated in several fish and fisheries orientated projects (SESAME, REPRODUCE, SEAMAN).

Evelina Sabatella. She is a fishery economist, with more than 20 years working experience in the field of socio-economic aspects of Mediterranean and European fisheries. Economist and expert in structural fisheries statistics, she has coordinated the implementation of the national program for collection of fisheries data since 2002. She acted as National Correspondent pursuant to Article 25.4 of the EC Reg. No. 1380/2015 from March 2015 to April 2019. She chaired the Regional Coordination Meeting for the Mediterranean and Black Sea (RCM MED&BS) under the EU DCF, the Planning Group on Economic Issues – PGECON and the STECF EWG on NP evaluation. She has been involved, in some cases as scientific responsible, in several research projects and studies funded by the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policy. She acted as consultant to the GFCM (General Fisheries Commission of the Mediterranean) in the review of the information system for management purposes. She has been member of the Scientific, Technical and Economic committee for Fisheries (STECF) and she chaired the working group of the European Commission responsible for the review and harmonization of methodologies for the collection of economic data (STECF/SGECA and PGECON). She chaired the EAFE (European Association of Fisheries Economists) from 2005 to 2009.

Paolo Sartor. He holds a Master Degree in Biological Sciences (1988) and a PhD in Fishery Biology (1993). Currently, he is the responsible of the Marine Fisheries Team at CIBM. His work focuses on fish and shellfish population dynamics, stock assessment, gear selectivity, impact of fishing gears, discard assessment. Since 2002, he has been involved in the Data Collection Framework: he gained knowledge in data collection designing and implementation and familiarity with the EU CFP and MSFD. In the last 15 years he has coordinated and participated to a range of EU and Italian national research projects/grants and he is the author/co-author of numerous scientific publications. He attended as expert in several STECF and GFCM Working Groups and other international and national committees on fisheries. From 2009 to 2015, he was President of the Nekton and Fisheries Committee of the Italian Marine Biology Society.

Mario Sbrana. He holds a Master Degree in Biological Sciences (1988) and a PhD in Marine Ecology (University of Pisa, 1995) He has more than 20 years of experience. His work focuses on fishery studies, fish and shellfish population dynamics, stock assessment, gear selectivity, impact of fishing gears, analysis of landing and discard data. He is co-author of more than 40 papers on scientific journals. From 2003 to 2006, he has been contracted as EU Fishery Inspector. Currently, he holds the position of researcher at CIBM, and is coordinator of the activities under the EU DCF carried out for the FAO-GFCM GSA9.

Maria Teresa Spedicato. She has more than 25-years experience in the field of fish population dynamics, stock assessment, fishery management, telemetry and spatial distribution/dynamics, fish behaviour and welfare. Currently, she is research director at COISPA. She is involved in the Data Collection Framework, formerly Data Collection Regulation, since 2002 on the topics related to the biological samplings and scientific surveys at sea. She was responsible of the Grant MARE/2014/19 “Strengthening regional cooperation in the area of fisheries data collection in the Mediterranean and Black Sea“, and of the Contract – EASME/EMFF/2014/1.3.2.7/si2.703 193 “Study on the evaluation of specific management scenarios for the preparation of multiannual management plans in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea” in 2015-2016. She is the author/co-author of several scientific publications. She acted as international coordinator of the MEDITS program from 2010 to 2016 and as Coordinator of the MAREA Framework (MARE/2009/05/Lot1) from 2010 to 2015 and is currently coordinating the Framework Contract EASME/EMFF/2016/032. In this Framework she is responsible of the Specific Project No. 03EASME/EMFF/2017/1.3.2.3/01/ SI2.793201 -SC03 – MED_UNITs – Study on Advancing fisheries assessment and management advice in the Mediterranean by aligning biological and management units of priority species. She has participated to the Activities of SAC-FAO (Scientific Advisory Committee-SAC, GFCM) since 2000 and to the sessions of STECF-SGMED-EWG since 2008.

Paolo Tagliolato. He is a researcher of the National Research Council (CNR), working in the Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA), unit of Milan. He graduated in Mathematics and he completed the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in the area of multimedia information retrieval. His research focused on spatial analysis, semantic spatial data infrastructure, sensor and environmental data management, semantic interoperability and architecture of virtual laboratories in the context of environmental data european research infrastructures (LifeWatch, eLTER). For the EU Commission Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), he contributed, as the Italian representative in the MIPW-7a group, to the technical guidance for implementing download services using OGC SOS standard, and to the guidelines for the use of Observations and Measurements and Sensor Web Enablement-related standards. He is in the core-developers group of GET-IT Starter Kit (www.get-it.it). He authored papers in international and national Journals, books and Conferences in the topics of his research.

George Tserpes holds a Master’s degree on Marine Biology and a PhD degree in Applied Biolgy. He holds a position of Research Director position in the Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters (IMBRIW) of HCMR since 2008. He has a wide experience on aspects related to the management of demersal and large pelagic fisheries through its participation in STECF groups (regular member from 1998 to 2002), GFCM and ICCAT meetings. He is currently coordinating the Working Group on Stock Assessment of Demersal Species (WGSAD) of GFCM and since 2003 the Mediterranean Swordfish Working Group of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). He has been involved in about 60 national and international projects coordinating 30 of them and has authored/coauthored more than 100 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and conference proceedings.

Claudio Viva. He holds a Master Degree in Biological Sciences (University of Pisa, Italy). He has more than 25 years of experience in fisheries science relating to the implementation of the CFP. His work focuses on fish population dynamics, stock assessments, ecosystem impacts of fishing gears, and analysis of landing and discard data. Since 1988, he is involved in fish resource evaluation by means of trawl surveys; since 2002, he is participating to the European data collection in the GSA9. He has participated to a variety of EU and national research projects. From 1994 to 1998 and from 2008 to 2014 he has been contracted as Fishery Inspector in EU DG MARE. His works focused in checking the implementation by the Member States of EU fisheries legislation, drafting evaluation reports of inspection programmes and preparing follow-up action in respect of such enquiries concerning the implementation of the Common fisheries policy.

Martina Zilioli holds a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology (2011) and a Second Master’s degree in Science Communication (2013). She currently holds a permanent position as research technologist at the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Her researches are focused on methods and tools to enable biological data reporting of both communities and research infrastructures (LTER-Italia, DCF-Italia, eLTER, https://www.lter-europe.net/lter-europe) to policy conventions and regulations. Concerning software development, her activities range from collection and analysis of user/ICT requirements to supply services (training courses, multimedia contents) for facilitate user interactions with web applications. She gained experience in dissemination and outreach by participating in several actions of national and European projects. Since 2018, she has supported the building of the Italian database for fishery management (https://dcf-italia.cnr.it/web/).

Walter Zupa. Ph.D. in Marine Sciences (Bari University, Italy). Permanent position as researcher at COISPA since 2009. His focus interests are on board and at landing place fishery data collection, spatial analysis (software: QGIS, SAGA, GRASS); statistical analysis (R CRAN); application of GLM and GAM models, fish tagging and fish welfare indicators. He is involved in DCF since 2006.