Several Mediterranean Member States have, prior to 1993, initiated national programmes to assess the demersal resources exploited by their fleets from repetitive research campaigns. The MEDITS programme, launched in 1993 on an initiative from the European Commission (DG XIV), aimed to make these programmes sustainable or promoted to a set of countries, to enable a standardisation of the practical modalities of application and provide a common knowledge based on this topic. The geographical coverage of the programme includes all the trawler facades of 12 states contributing to this Survey in the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania) and since 2009 in the Black Sea ( Romania and Bulgaria). The standardization of observation methods allows the reproduction of bottom trawling under similar conditions and thus the comparison of abundance indices of different species between different areas from year to year. These protocols focus on the Survey period, the location of sampling stations, the characteristics and methods of use of the capture craft, biological observations (weighing, counting, measurements, analysis of maturity, otolith samples), the formats of computer files. They have been defined in common and are applied by all the teams participating in the program. States must therefore collect data and manage these direct assessment campaigns. For the French part, the trawled areas are Eastern Corsica and the Gulf of Lion.

Data from each Survey have been and will be used to provide several indicators required by fisheries managers for: (1) international expertise (direct and indirect stock assessments), abundance indices used for the calibration of certain stock assessment models for the CGPM (General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean) or the STECF(Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee of Fisheries; (2) national expertise (responses to DPMA referrals, popularization with the profession); (GALION projects); Ecosystem approach of Fisheries (providing data to characterize breeding and feeding habitats), MSFD (Marine Strategy Framework Directive) hydrology (CTD, WP2 and PocketFerrybox) gelatinous and macrolitters.