The submarine canyon system of the Gulf of Lion, the easternmost point of the entire Iberian Peninsula, is home to nearly 2,200 species, a quarter of the species recorded in the Mediterranean, discovered thanks to research carried out in the LIFE+ INDEMARES project, coordinated by the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment.
 
The area has a wide variety of ecosystems in a relatively small area: coastal ecosystems, shelf and slope ecosystems and underwater canyon communities, so it has a high biodiversity. The great richness of this place is due in part to the abundance of plankton, with larval stages of fish of commercial interest such as hake and krill, which are also a source of food for many fish and cetaceans.
 
In addition, the Creus canyon is home to one of the best-preserved cold-water coral communities of Madrepora oculata and Lophelia pertusa in the Mediterranean, species that have disappeared in other areas due to the pressure exerted by human activity.
 
The striped dolphin and the fin whale are common in the area, where the bottlenose dolphin, typical of coastal habitats, has also been observed. The canyon is also an essential habitat for important bird populations, including the presence of the Mediterranean shearwater with sightings of up to 1,200 specimens in a single day, as well as the endangered Balearic shearwater. During the winter, the sandwich tern is very abundant on the waters of the canyon, as well as the European storm petrel, the Audouin’s gull and the Atlantic gannet.
 
This wide variety of marine habitats and environments is also home to a large number of other animal species with very different lifestyles, such as filter feeders, suspensivores, detritivores, scavengers and hunters, which benefit from the high biological productivity characteristic of the waters of the Gulf of Lion. This species richness responds to a series of factors that, exceptionally, concur simultaneously in the marine area of the Western Canyon System of the Gulf of Lion.
 
These characteristics have led to the proposal of the submarine canyons of the Gulf of Lion as a Site of Community Importance (SCI) at European level that will protect, thanks to the results of the LIFE+ INDEMARES project, an area of almost 100,000 hectares of high ecological value.