Volume 75 Published on 10 July 2017
Large-scale exploration campaigns in the canyon heads and hard beds of the French Mediterranean were undertaken by the French Marine Protected Areas Agency (now the Agence Française pour la Biodiversité) between 2008 and 2010. The MedSeaCan campaign explored the area south of the continent and the CorSeaCan campaign the area west of Corsica. The data collected were processed, completed and edited for the Protected Marine Areas Agency by the GIS Posidonie research network and the Mediterranean Institute for Biology and Ecology (IMBE).
This guide was prepared using photographic and video records in order to facilitate the identification of the main species found in Mediterranean canyons using simple visual criteria. Each species factsheet includes information retrieved from the research campaigns (photos, bathymetric distribution, geographical distribution on a minimap, observations extracted from videos) as well as more general information from the scientific literature. This guide to the deep-sea fauna of the Mediterranean is not exhaustive and does not cover all the species observed during the campaigns, but only the most common or iconic species of submarine canyons.
