Citizen science and CROpwall on the 7th European Phycological Congress (EPC7)

The European Phycological Congress is being held for the seventh time, this year in Croatia, in Zagreb from 25th to 30th of August. The main local organizer is the Faculty of Science in Zagreb. We are participating in the EPC7 with the data of our activities and research, which were carried out as part of the CROpwall Science-Expedition-Volunteer Camp 2017 in Mljet National Park. That research we continued last year, and started this year on Silba Island. This research survey was in the form of standardized monitoring of the meadows of an endemic sea grass species in the Mediterranean – Neptune sea grass ( Posidonica oceanica ). In the conference program of the symposium “Public outreach and citizen science” Hrvoje Cizmek presented a lecture titled: “Need for increased effort – could recreational divers improve the efficiency of sea grass monoitoring?”. The results have shown that they can, and such research camps are a very good way of gathering a large amount of data in a short time that we otherwise would not be able to collect without the involvement of non-biologists. The research participants went through trainings and repetitive calibrations with leading scientists and gave very good results. We continue to apply this practice and similar research and encourage the citizen science approach in our research.

The research was conducted as part of the first CROpwall camp, led by the 20000 Leagues as a local partner, with the coordination of the British organization Operation Wallacea, which organizes similar camps and research surveys in 15 different locations around the world.