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The central principle in the NEAT method is a hierarchical, nested structure of spatial assessment units (called SAU in the software and the remainder of the report) and habitats. In later releases, this will be expanded to ecosystem components. The order of these hierarchies is such that the assessment begins with the hierarchically nested SAUs. Figure 1 shows an example of such a hierarchy.

The NEAT (Nested Environmental status Assessment Tool) software is a flexible and user-friendly desktop application implementing the biodiversity assessment tool developed in work package 6 (Integrative assessment of biodiversity) of the DEVOTES project (http://www. devotes-project. eu). The current version integrates an indicator catalogue (Teixeira et al. 2014) as a source for choosing predefined indicators for the biodiversity assessment. These indicators are the same as those present in the version 7 of the DEVOTool software (http://www. devotes-project. eu/devotool). Four different setups are preconfigured for the use in the four European Regional Seas, showing only the indicators which have been assigned to the respective Sea according to Teixeira et al.(2014). A custom configuration is also possible.