European Ocean Biodiversity Information System

12 sapmpling stations. The dataset includes an inventory of records of 253 sampling expeditions during 1996 -1998 period. In total, 12 sampling sites from UK, France, Malta and Spain were selected, from which half of them were corresponded to affected locations and the rest to reference locations. The sampling equipment and the methods used were the following: beam trawls, scallop dredges, Naturalist's dredges, ring dredges, bucket dredges, van Veen grabs, Day grabs, Jonasson & Olausson box cores, Senckenberg box cores, hand-held cores, air-lifting, resin cast cores, resin cast burrows, video from a Remote Operated Vehicle, 1m2 quadrats, SCUBA, AQUAREVE dredges, Reineck box cores and Smith-Mclntyre grabs, water samples,Rallier du Baty samples, vertical sampler cores, hand vane testers, plankton nets, Secchi disc. All records were digitized and species names were cross-checked and taxonomically updated using the Taxon Match tool “World Register of Marine Species” (http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=match).