The UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has awarded £1.7million to ‘Capturing our Coast’, a project designed to explore how the marine environment is responding to global climate change.
The project will train over 3,000 volunteers – making it the largest experimental marine citizen science project ever undertaken in the UK. The volunteers will collect data around key species and it is hoped the new research will help inform future policy and conservation strategies.
The project is led by Newcastle University’s Dove Marine Laboratory and involves the universities of Hull, Portsmouth, Bangor and the Scottish Association for Marine Science. It also involves a number of organisations including the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, the Marine Conservation Society, Earthwatch Institute, the Natural History Museum, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, Cefas and the Coastal Partnerships Network.
Dr Nova Mieszkowska of the Marine Biological Association explained: “What is unique about this project is the level of experimental work involved. Rather than just facilitating volunteers to record where species occur, ‘Capturing our Coast’ will empower them to answer scientific questions, about species interactions and impacts on the marine environment. This will have enormous benefits for our understanding of how marine ecosystems are changing.”
This new project builds on previous work led by Newcastle University through the ‘Big Sea Survey’. Launched in 2010, the team recruited 357 citizen scientists to log flora and fauna along a 150 mile stretch of coastline from St Abbs to Saltburn.
Collecting 350,000 separate records over three years, the team identified a number of organisms which had previously not been seen so far north such as the rare stalked jellyfish and an invasive species of sea squirt known as Corella eumyota.
“One of the criticisms of citizen science is the accuracy of the data collected,” explains Dr Gordon Watson of Portsmouth University. “What is unique about this new national project is that we will turn all our volunteers into ‘specialists’, working on their own chosen topics or species. The novelty of this new training scheme will allow volunteers to work alongside scientists in an unprecedented way.”
The project will be open for volunteers wanting to take part from September 2015. For more information and to register your interest please email bigseasurvey@ncl.ac.uk.
