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	Opening Remarks By Dr. Elisabeth Lipiatou Ladies and gentlemen It's a real pleasure for me to be here today, at the 2nd Workshop of the Mediterranean Targeted Project. I must say it was a pleasure to contribute to the overall organisation along with Dr. Tselepidis and Dr. Wassman. Dr. Tselepidis took care of all the local organisation and I would like to thank him, and Professor Eleftheriou, on behalf of the Commission, for hosting the Workshop here in Crete. The Second Workshop of the Mediterranean Targeted Workshop, like the first one, is sponsored by the Marine Science and Technology Programme, for which the MTP is the largest project in the Mediterrranean Sea and the only one which MAST overall coordinates. We can see, on this OHP 1, OHP 2 that the Mediterranean Targeted project consists often individual projects, and two supporting initiatives, one on Data Management and one on Data Quality. Its scientific management is carried out by a Steering Committee which is chaired by the MAST Programme and its day-to-day management is assumed by MAST. Scientists from 14 European countries participate in the MTP. Its overall scientific objective is to better understand the Mediterranean ecosystem, in order to predict short and long-term changes. Its specific objectives are: to study and understand seasonal inter-annual variability of the general circulation; to study and quantify the bio-geochemical exchanges between the continental margins and the open sea to study the bio-geochemical composition of deep waters and sediments and finally to achieve more knowledge concerning key biological processes in the Mediterranean ecosystem. These objectives are distributed among 3 main themes. Theme 1 is concerned with general circulation studies Theme 2 is concerned with bio-geochemical studies and Theme 3 with Ecosystem Analysis. You can see from the information on the screen which project contributes to which theme. You can see of course that all projects form part of Theme 3. The reason for this is that this team addresses the main objectives of the Mediterranean Targeted Project by integrating all the investigations carried out under Theme 1 and Theme 2. Coordination Here you can see a type of Calendar or workplan of the Mediterranean Targeted Project, of which the pilot phase started in 1993. You can see the starting dates of the different contracts and that it is planned to finish in 1996. You can also see the different Steering Committee meetings. The first took place in September 1993 in Athens and the last took place yesterday here in Crete. You can also see the first Workshop of the MTP which was organised in Barcelona in November 1994 by Michel Canals. In the first MTP Workshop, we had around 50 contributions, which presented mainly preliminary results on general circulation studies and bio-geochemical studies, to which Themes 1 and 2 contributed, as we saw before. The present Workshop, in addition to presenting more complete contributions from Themes 1 and 2, also provides the starting point for the integration of data between the different projects, as previously referred to, for Theme 3 in the ecosystem analysis. Before I finish I would like to say that I have worked with the MTP for two years and it has been a great pleasure for me to witness how all of you came together and created a real community of scientists for the Mediterranean Sea, and we really hope that in the future this community will become larger, with the participation of scientists from countries which are not members of the Union.
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