Photographing marine flora and fauna to gauge the ocean’s condition on a day-to-day basis. This is the aim of RedPROMAR, an EU project, which invites members of the public to upload photos to its platform of what they find in the sea around the Canary Islands.
With more than 85,000 recorded and validated sightings in the waters of the so-called ‘Lucky Islands’ or Macaronesia, scientists from the RedPROMAR project have recorded more than 5,000 species of living organisms in this part of the North Atlantic.
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Dennis Rabeling, a diving instructor at Euro-Divers Lanzarote, is one of its main contributors. He dives every day and uploads thousands of photos of marine flora and fauna to the website of this European project, which is co-funded by the Government of the Canary Islands. He has contributed to the discovery of three species previously unknown in the Canary Islands, one of which is named after him: Gibberula Dennisi. “With RedPROMAR, if you upload your photos, you become another pair of eyes on the water. In this way, scientists can identify new species that we did not previously know lived here. Today, during a thirty-minute dive, we saw around twenty or thirty species, perhaps even more," he explains.
Through this project, ocean culture is brought into the classroom, and the classroom is brought closer to the sea. This year, secondary school pupils from Juan Francisco Rodríguez García’s class at IES Yaiza have studied how human activities affect the marine environment, recorded a podcast on tropicalisation and its consequences, and undertaken a field trip to Órzola, in the north of Lanzarote, to learn ‘in situ’ which species live in the sea and how RedPROMAR works.
An experience their pupils will never forget. Aroa says, “I didn’t even know most of the species. I hadn’t heard those names before at all. Take the manatee, for example. When an animal tries to bother it, it releases a kind of purple ink to scare it away. It’s really amazing."
The total budget for the project is just under two million euros, of which 85% has been funded by the European Cohesion Policy and the remaining 15% by the Canary Islands Government.
The pieces of the photo jigsaw speak
This project began in the Canary Islands and has since expanded its scope to Cape Verde, Madeira and the Azores. Each geotagged photo is checked by a team of experts. Marc Martín Sola, a marine biologist at Gesplan and a technician with RedPROMAR, says that “citizen science data is like a jigsaw puzzle, in which observers provide us with small pieces that, taken individually, may not make sense”, but when put together, they are valuable to the scientific community and to the authorities.
The platform also serves as an early-warning system for the arrival of alien species and the proliferation of species linked to human activity or climate change. “There are specific times when we receive a lot of reports, a lot of sightings of a particular species, and this usually coincides with ‘arribazones’ (washed ashore) – the mass arrival of organisms, whether alive or dead, on the coast,” explains Marc. “In 2024, we had more than a hundred sightings in just a few months. "Citizen science enables us to detect and record these sudden surges that might otherwise go unnoticed by the scientific community and thus keep a record of when and where they have occurred," he concludes.