Following the recommendation of the 14th Ordinary Meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Barcelona Convention to establish inventories, cartography and monitoring networks of seagrass meadows, RAC/SPA developed the MedPosidonia Project for four Mediterranean countries having vast Posidonia meadows on their coasts.

The project aims primarily to collect information on the presence and the evolution of the Posidonia meadows in selected sites in order to enable the participating countries to establish/adjust their biodiversity conservation and sustainable management programmes. It is a first pilot phase which will be extended to other areas in the future.

This project was developed thanks to financial support from the Total Foundation and the contributions of RAC/SPA and the four participating countries (Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey).

Its total cost is of about 340 000 EUR, with a contribution of 60 % from Total Corporate Foundation, 20 % from RAC/SPA and 20% (in kind contribution) from the beneficiary countries. The project implementation duration was 3 years, from June 2006 to June 2009.The MedPosidonia Project proceeded following four axes of activities:

• Activity 1: Make an inventory and characterization of Posidonia meadows.
• Activity 2: Mapping of the selected Posidonia meadows.
• Activity 3: Enhance meadow monitoring networks.
• Activity 4: Communicate about the Posidonia ecosystem and the results of the project.