1) To contribute to the inventarisation of the global biodiversity of marine benthic communities, including microbenthos, meiobenthos, macrobenthos, hyperbenthos and epibenthos. 2) To investigate patterns in marine benthic biodiversity on different spatial scales along several ecological gradients. 3) To investigate the relationships between biodiversity and various measures of system productivity and other environmental factors along several ecological gradients. 4) To determine the partitioning of biodiversity between the different benthic compartments. 5) To determine the relationship between food-web structure and biodiverisity of the benthos. 6) To identify indicator taxa (species or species groups) to be used as target organisms (or groups of organisms) for comparision of global patterns of biodiversity. 7) To investigate the relationship between phenotypical and genotypical of micro- and meiobenthic indicator taxa.