Biodiversity restoration and other conservation measures in marine protected areas promote atmospheric carbon sequestration and accelerate resilience in coastal and offshore environments. These actions are so important that they constitute one of the ten challenges of the Decade of the Oceans declared by the UN (2021-2030), challenge number 2, is “Protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity”.

OCEAN CITIZEN is an international project financed by the European Community, which combines the ecological vision of restoration with citizen participation, providing economic benefits for local communities.

To carry out this ambitious program, researchers from 20 institutions and 7 European countries participate, executing different tasks in a coordinated manner in five marine areas of the European community.

Implement a long-term Multidisciplinary Monitoring Program to evaluate the results of a coastal restoration and marine conservation Plan, in marine protected areas (MPA) and replicas in other marine areas.

To fully monitor the environmental variation in one of the five action areas of “Ocean Citizen”, Canary Islands, a multidisciplinary and multisensory observation platform will be installed and equipped with physical-chemical and acoustic sensors and a sediment trap, complemented with periodic surveys with video recording and an autonomous robot. This platform will allow the study of the flow and immobilization of carbon in marine animal forests.

We will report the results and related publications on this website, in the “news” and “Publications” sections.

It is still early to draw conclusions, but you can follow the course of the investigation on this website.

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