Citizen science based marine environmental monitoring. The MOANA60 Experience

Sea water quality monitoring is an extremely important activity that following traditional methods is extremely demanding and expensive. This results often in the sea being largely under-sampled while scientific models are increasingly hungry of high resolution and high coverage data. A different approach needs to be pursued that could complement what is already available within the traditional practices with new data. The National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS developed innovative technologies that can be used within a citizen science or crowdsensing approach to monitor marine environmental parameters. These technologies consist of an acquisition and transmission device that sends data to the central OGS data collecting facility. The simultaneous installation of multiple such devices on boats of opportunity allows to create a network of mobile monitoring platforms and data management infrastructure able to acquire, store, process, validate and display in quasi-real-time georeferenced data on a web portal. This allows to share information on the quality of seawater with the scientific community but also with the public at large. If this allows the improvement of the environmental awareness of this latter and in particular of volunteers that are involved in the specific activity of data collection, at the same time this can dramatically improve spatial and temporal coverage of data. So far, the system has been installed mainly on recreational ships that covered restricted coastal areas, in the Gulf of Trieste (Northern Adriatic Sea); this work will report, instead, on an extension of the system done in collaboration with the Moana 60 Lab initiative that took place in the summer of 2021 and where it was possible to cover a large transect in the Tyrrhenian Sea between the Aeolian islands, the harbour of the city of Trapani and the Aegadian islands protected area. Recordings were accurate and highlighted interesting features especially when compared with satellite data. In addition, in the area of the Aeolian islands, the system was able to map with great precision the submarine hydrothermal vents insisting in that area.