Between March 5 and 6, Heraklion, the capital of Crete, hosted the second partner meeting of the ARTEMIS Project. The event, organized by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), brought together all project partners for two days of presentations, workshops, and discussions. These sessions were crucial for consolidating the achievements of the first phase of the project while launching key activities for the second phase.
ARTEMIS’s Project Partners meeting in Heraklion, Crete – March 2025
“Here in Heraklion, we are reaching an important milestone in the implementation of our activities,” says Arnaud Terrisse, ARTEMIS’ project manager and Biodiversity Programme Officer in Plan Bleu (Regional Activity Centre of UNEP/MAP). “We have addressed several key issues and resolved challenges among partners. Now, we are ready to move forward with restoration at the various pilot sites, leveraging all the data we’ve gathered to work on the financial and governance aspects, ensuring a lasting legacy in the conservation of Posidonia Oceanica in the Mediterranean.”
Alice Wittevrongel and Arnaud Terrisse from Plan Bleu at the ARTEMIS’s project partners’ Meeting in Crete – March 2025
Alice Wittevrongel, who oversees the project alongside Arnaud Terrisse, adds: “We are currently in the process of developing financial mechanisms. These will be co-created with pilot sites in Sardinia, Menorca, Crete, and Monfalcone, tailored to their specific needs, and subsequently tested, aiming to finalize PES scheme agreements by the end of the project”.
During the initial sessions, all partners provided progress updates. Representatives from MEDSEA, IME-OBSAM, HCMR, and Monfalcone presented detailed updates on the pilot sites, with a particular focus on biodiversity and blue carbon data.
“It’s been two very busy days here in Heraklion, but now we have almost all the results from Task 1.2 at the three pilot sites. We now know the current ecological status of the seagrass meadows at the pilot sites and the magnitude of the ecosystem services we study during this project, namely blue carbon storage and biodiversity . We’ve outlined the restoration plans for each pilot, and it’s time to move forward with implementing the transplantations,” says Eugenia Apostolaki, a senior researcher at HCMR and expert in seagrass ecology.
“ARTEMIS is a very innovative project. Few studies exist that have provided figures on active and passive restoration on a cost-based approach,” says Alessio Capriolo, an environmental economist at ISPRA. “We want to assess the need for achieving and maintaining high ecological quality and, on the other hand, focus on the concrete economic needs to support the related actions. The economic value we are going to quantify in the Posidonia meadows must be useful first of all to the authorities responsible for their management and conservation.”
Alessio Capriolo, Environmental Economist at ISPRA – ARTEMIS in Crete, Project Partners’ meeting – March 2025
ECOACSA, DENKSTATT, Plan Bleu, and BAX have worked diligently over the past months on the first steps to develop a “cookbook” for funding Posidonia restoration in the Mediterranean—a scientific manual outlining a novel approach.
Currently, we most have academic data on the ecosystem services that Posidonia can offer to communities. With ARTEMIS, we are proposing a new method where biological and economic data intertwine”, emphasizes Martin Georgiev from EY denkstatt. “Restoration is a lengthy process, and we must find a way to showcase the value of restoration to all potential investors.”
Group photo taken during the ARTEMIS meeting in Crete, March 2025.
