Date Time Targeted removals and monitoring can help manage lionfish in Mediterranean Targeted removals can be effective in suppressing the number of invasive lionfish found within protected coastlines around the Mediterranean Sea. However, if they are to really be successful they need to be combined with better long-term monitoring by communities and conservationists to ensure their timing and location achieve the best results. Those are the key findings of a new study, one of the first of its kind to examine the effectiveness of targeted lionfish removals from both an ecological and a socio-economic perspective. Scientists working as part of the European Union-fundedRELIONMED project teamed up with specially trained divers and citizen scientists to conduct a series of removal events and surveys over a six-month period.