In Portuguese marine waters, at great distance from the continental Portuguese shore, from Azores and Madeira Islands, there are two important assemblies of submarine reliefs, the submarine archipelago Great Meteor and the complex Madeira-Tore.
The project BIOMETORE established a unique consortia that evolves all the main institutions of marine research from Portugal with the goal of studying the biodiversity and increasing knowledge about these important biotopes. In the scope of this project, eight campaigns of scientific research were programmed between 2015 and 2016 to these two submarine territories to acquire physical, chemical and biological data.
The data collection, coordinated by multidisciplinary teams from all the institutions of the consortia, aimed to contribute to the biodiversity characterization and mapping of these oceanic areas. The BIOMETORE project also proposes to design a sustainability and management plan for the marine areas under study and to support the evaluation of the good environmental state in the scope of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).