Although it is clear that both human and climate variation have the capability of affecting natural systems, we are currently facing the pressing uncertainty on what the responses of specific ecosystems will be, given the imminent increase in pressure by humans and climate variations and how we can timely identify and assess them. To deal with this difficult task, modern ecology, approaches, tools, and more diverse disciplines have been incorporated in the last decades. From the retrospective analysis of the research schedule of the last three years as a work group, two important questions arose:

• Up to what extent are we capable of measuring biodiversity in marine ecosystems?
• To what extent can we predict the role biodiversity plays in the good working order and vulnerability of the coastal ecosystems in Northwest Mexico?

From these questions, the proposal for a project integrating biodiversity and vulnerability in coastal marine ecosystems emerged to allow integrating efforts and optimizing resources and academic accomplishments of a multidisciplinary group (seven researchers, two young researchers, seven technicians, ten graduate students, and four bachelor students) dealing with an innovative topic at international level, particularly for marine ecosystems.

We consider that having five ecosystems (mangrove, submarine mountain, coral reef, exposed rocky system, and coastal lagoon) generally subjected to low exploitation by humans (compared to totally modified regions), under similar environmental variability levels (due to their proximity), and for which there is a good number of previous ecological records, grant us a privileged experimental opportunity. We are convinced that we can provide important elements for such a difficult topic.

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