The ICM leads collaborative initiatives between science and society to contribute to research.
It was not professional scientists who made the great scientific breakthroughs until late in the 19th century, but rather the curiosity of amateurs. In fields such as astronomy and botany, thousands of inexpert contributions have helped to discover new stars or species, and continue to do so nowadays.
During the 20th century, science became increasingly professionalised and the number of disciplines and specialties grew rapidly as the influence and interconnectedness of formal institutions such as universities and research centres grew. As a result, barriers have been created between those with access to scientific knowledge and the general public, and science has become locked in an ivory tower from which it is difficult to dislodge.
Fortunately, more and more citizen science initiatives are emerging that seek to reverse this trend and involve everyone in the scientific method, while enriching science with data that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Towards more democratic research
Society now has at its disposal knowledge, tools and resources that can contribute to the advancement of research. Citizen science is a way of generating scientific knowledge with the active involvement of non-specialists in the field.
This research is conducted partly or entirely by amateur or non-professional scientists who may be involved in some, several or all stages of the research process. These include the collection, processing and interpretation of data, as well as the identification and definition of problems.
During this process, volunteers involved in citizen science initiatives, while contributing data, acquire new knowledge and skills, leading to more democratic research as a result of an open, collaborative and cross-cutting scenario that creates interactions between science, society and policy.
However, the fact that non-specialists are involved in citizen science research does not mean that the results are less reliable. There are different ways to bring rigour and quality to these projects. A very common one is to involve the scientific community in the different phases of the process, from design to data verification and interpretation.
Marine citizen science
The climate crisis, overfishing and marine pollution, among many other anthropogenic threats, are threatening the future of the ocean. Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need to improve and consolidate marine conservation efforts. This is why the United Nations has declared the period from 2021 to 2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which aims to address knowledge gaps to increase ocean conservation actions by governments and communities.
Marine citizen science stands as a promising tool for achieving these marine conservation goals worldwide. It can also improve the scientific literacy of the public by enabling communities to engage with the ocean. In turn, basing marine citizen science in communities makes the results more rapidly applicable to policy and management.
Successes and challenges
Citizen science has proven successful in many projects across the world's seas. For example, non-specialist scientists have been involved in Australia, where people have been empowered to advocate for reef health through educational experiences and local conservation actions. Similarly, in the Pelagie archipelago (Italy), tourist boats have been used to investigate the spatio-temporal distribution of loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) in one of the main feeding grounds of this species in the Mediterranean where, in addition, there is a high mortality rate induced by fishing. And the French are using data from recreational divers to identify marine species.
But this is not all: citizen science initiatives have also monitored transient biological phenomena on a large scale, such as the blooming of jellyfish species in Malta. Finally, this scientific approach has been used to monitor populations and identify different species of underwater fish in three future Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Tunisia, where no significant differences were found between data collected by scientific divers and scientifically trained volunteer divers.
However, citizen science also faces some challenges. One of them is that it usually focuses on data collection and does not involve participants in the later stages of the scientific process. Experts therefore advocate a "scientific citizenship" that is capable of rethinking the ways science works and making citizen science a democratic process with the capacity to transform politics and society.
On the other hand, there are some detractors of this practice who consider that it could give more tasks to people who work in science professionally, as they would have to review and transcribe the information. Finally, there are those who have doubts about these non-experts, especially when projects offer financial rewards for participation. However, there are many success stories in science and popular science texts, and most agree that if done well, citizen science is highly beneficial for all parties.
Observadores del Mar celebrates its 10th anniversary
Observadores del Mar is a benchmark platform for citizen science that, since 2012, has been dedicated to the conservation of the marine environment by involving citizens in this task. It does so by proposing challenges and providing direct and simple scientific protocols so that they can participate in the scientific process. It is coordinated by three CSIC centres; the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM) in Barcelona, the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Blanes (CEAB) and the Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados (IMEDEA). Its aim is to involve different sectors of society and form a broad network of citizens, organisations linked to the sea and the educational community to collaborate with the scientific teams that lead and advise the projects.
Nearly a hundred scientists are in charge of validating the data of the volunteer observers and teach them how to collect the data in the same way they would do it themselves in order to facilitate the subsequent standardisation of the data. This is achieved by organising workshops in different parts of the coast. In this sense, in 2020 they obtained 11,135 validated observations, of which 764 stood out for their scientific value or photographic quality. In addition, 34 species of interest included in lists of ecologically relevant species were reported on the platform.
The ICM has also launched other citizen science initiatives, such as the Patí Científic, a project to monitor the coastal waters of Barcelona that has converted the Patí Català, a small, traditionally built and sustainable catamaran, into a scientific vessel. Another successful initiative is BioMARató, which promotes the conservation of the marine environment by photographing the fauna and flora of the Catalan coastline to use the data in marine studies.