Jellywatch.org: Monitoring global marine ecosystems

JELLYWATCH.ORG - Monitoring the ocean on a global scale can be an expensive and frankly impossible undertaking. The area that has to be covered is simply too large for any ship, expedition, or research team. However thousands... [ view full abstract ]

JELLYWATCH.ORG - Monitoring the ocean on a global scale can be an expensive and frankly impossible undertaking. The area that has to be covered is simply too large for any ship, expedition, or research team. However thousands or millions of people experience the ocean each day in all corners of the earth. By tapping into this pool of citizen scientists, we can aspire to generate a global network of observers to monitor the state of ocean health. In particular, at jellywatch.org we are interested in the timing and distribution of blooms of jellyfish. Since launching the list a little more than a year ago, we have received nearly thousands of sightings from North and South America, Indo-Pacific, Africa, the Mideast, Asia, and Europe — from the Arctic Ocean to the Coral Triangle. The database and images that are submitted are freely available to anyone to use in their own research. So far, our jellywatchers have identified blooms across broad regions of the Gulf of Mexico, revealed interesting and unusual species, and mapped out global occurrence of "By the Wind Sailors". Future plans include developing improved visualization tools for examining temporal and spatial patterns.