Some of the above indicators require investigating the functioning of ecosystems (Cardoso et al., 2010 and Borja et al., 2011). One of the ways to analyse functioning is the use of biological traits analysis, which requires information on species, not of families (Bremner et al., 2006). Hence, obtaining biological

information to lower degree of taxonomic separation, reducing the needs of current monitoring (e.g. for the WFD), will result in the need to invest more money in the future to monitor the new issues required by new monitoring programmes (e.g. for the MSFD) or result in the monitoring being not fit-for-purpose. However, in the meantime, we will lose long-term monitoring series, which are necessary to see more study the effects of human activities on those descriptors, and especially the recovery of ecosystems, after human intervention (Borja et al., 2010b and Verdonschot

et al., 2013). Hence, the consequence of the choices made now, during times of economic crisis, mainly focusing on a selection of structure elements (and reducing them to high taxonomic levels), with only an indirect link to functioning and with the perceived aim of reducing as much as possible the cost of the monitoring programme (as stated also by De Jonge et al., 2006), is that the European countries will not able to meet the requirements as formulated by new directives, such as the MSFD, in terms of functioning of ecosystems. Here we are aminophylline not calling for monitoring at all costs, or for unrestricted or RAD001 ic50 poorly defined monitoring in which data are collected just as a ‘security blanket’. Almost two decades ago, we complained that monitoring was being done without thought, merely to give the impression that something was being done irrespective of whether the data were being used (Elliott and De Jonge, 1996). Our fear then, and needless-to-say

many of those messages given then still apply, was that poor monitoring and/or poor use of the resulting data, would eventually give environmental managers the ammunition to remove monitoring on the basis that it was not and could not deliver useful information but really was a ‘job-creation exercise’ for marine scientists and technicians and so it could be cut without consequence. Now we feel that such a ‘pruning’ has gone too far and is reaching (or has already reached) the point when it cannot provide useful information for management. Hence, we are arguing, still, for a rigorous but scientifically defendable approach. De Jonge et al. (2006) acknowledged that there is insufficient funding to measure and monitor everything and so there is the need to achieve cost-effective monitoring and thus to rely on surrogates for detecting change.