Last week (3-8 July 2016) the WoRCS initiative was presented to the 16th International Meiofauna Conference (IsIMCo) that was hosted by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

This year, 69 oral and 94 poster presentations were included in the conference program by 133 authors from 33 countries. They covered a wide range of research fields, such as the response of meiobenthos to environmental changes, climate change and acidification, biodiversity and ecosystem function, phylogeny and biogeography, amongst many other “hot” topics.

IsIMCo provides a great opportunity to make small invisible creatures visible to the outer world. The WoRCS initiative includes a considerable number of meiobenthic taxa and could be used as a valuable tool in order to facilitate exchange of information towards this goal.

At the conference, the WoRCS poster was surrounded by those of other relevant initiatives: the World Database of Free-Living Marine Nematodes (NeMys), integrated in the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), and the Greek Taxon Information System (GTIS), an application developed by the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) that has resumed efforts to compile a complete checklist of species reported from Greece.