The main objectif during the first month of this secondment was to interact with the colleagues from the University Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE; in particular Alex da Silva and Moacyr Araujo) and the University Federal Rural de Pernambuco (UFRPE; in particular Flávia Lucena Frédou, Thierry Frédou and Paulo Travassos) to discuss how developping an integrated approach to obtain key ecosystem information for Marine Spatial Planning. The initial bibliographical work has highlighted a number of aspects limiting our ability to fully understand the processes at work in the marine ecosystems of Northeast Brazil. These included an overall lack of information on the different abiotic and biotic compartments of the ecosystems, but also a lack of capacity on techniques such as ecosystem acoustics (see Task 2.2). We therefore started to synthesize existing information and prepare a strategy to fill these gaps. This strategy was based on a dual approach: (i) analysing, through the co-supervision of students, the existing data (e.g. at sea survey ABRACOS 1 and carried out in 2015 and 2017) in order to better understand the dynamics of the ecosystem; and (ii) carrying out field activities to obtain essential complementary data in particular on fish, fishers and seabirds distribution; these field work also being used for capacity building.