Evaluation of the Role of Citizen Observatories in Integrated Ocean and Coastal Observing Systems

VIII International Symposium on Marine Sciences, 6-8 July 2022, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, España

Data quality is the key element in Ocean & Coastal Observing Systems to provide reliable measurements for developing evidence-based environmental policies. The H2020 MINKE project (Metrology for Integrated marine maNagement and Knowledge-transfer nEtwork) focuses on a multidimensional concept to evaluate the data quality: The project proposes a new vision in the design of marine monitoring networks, integrating two dimensions of data quality, namely accuracy and completeness, as the driving components of quality in data acquisition. In particular MINKE will evaluate the benefits of using more conventional systems of advanced instrumentation (accuracy) with the complementary information provided by volunteers (completeness), using citizen observatories to report and validate their own observations. The development of the participatory activities in MINKE will be promoted throughout free access to the MINKA citizen observatory, a cloud-based platform that allows creating specific projects, managed by the own communities of volunteers, to monitor marine target species or coastal areas of interest. MINKA will offer as well a virtual access to participatory monitoring networks based on low-cost sensor technologies and courses providing the communities with the use of open hardware and software solutions; and networking and consultation activities will be conducted work with citizen scientists to generate specific datasets that are of interest to the citizen science community and that are useful targets as for example marine litter monitoring methodologies. MINKE’s new vision ise framed within a quintuple helix model of innovation, incorporating the natural environmental context (ocean health), the civil society (NGO, makers community, social media and citizen science platforms), the academia, the industry and the governments as the factors involved in monitoring the network design

MINKE reports to INFRAIA-02-2020: Integrating Activities for Starting Communities (grant agreement n. 101008724)

Peer reviewed