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. 2018 Oct 5;8:14871. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-33237-w

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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The Mediterranean Sea: a “miniature ocean” and a “giant mesocosm”. The Mediterranean Sea (a) is the deepest enclosed sea on Earth. Located between Africa, Europe and Asia, it connects with the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. The Strait of Sicily divides the sea into two sub-basins with contrasting oceanographic conditions, the western (0.85 million km²) and the eastern (1.65 million km²). The Mediterranean Sea hosts a number of emblematic species and habitats, such as the seagrass meadows of Posidonia oceanica (b, c) (images courtesy of Javier Díaz). Because of its particular oceanographic, geological and biological conditions, this “miniature ocean” is a giant mesocosm that can be used for horizon-scanning assessments on how the Earth’s oceans are responding to multiple stressors⁷.