Vasilis Valavanis is a researcher at the Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC), Greece. His background is in Biological Conservation, GIS, and Remote Sensing through a multidisciplinary curriculum at the Departments of Geography, Ocean Engineering, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Forestry, and Zoology at the University of Florida, USA. He has participated in projects funded by the European Commission and the Greek Government on GIS developments in fisheries research, monitoring of algal blooms, mapping of benthic habitats, extraction of oceanographic features from marine EO data, and use of EO data to the seasonal mapping of species population dynamics.