Jellyfish Sightings Along the Italian Coastline from 2009 to 2017
The lack of gelatinous blooms data reveals scant attention to such phenomena due to their irregular occurrence (Boero et al. 2008), to modern publication trends that give no importance to observations (Boero 2013b), to current monitoring programs that usually do not cover jellyfish (Riisgård et al. 2012) and to the lack of remote sensing tools to detect jellyfish. From 2009 the Italian project Occhio alla Medusa started involving citizens to record sightings of gelatinous organisms. In 2010 till 2015, the Italian popular science magazine FOCUS supported the campaign dedicating a webpage and releasing a smartphone app to upload records. From 2013 we started to collect data also from the web. In 2016 we opened a facebook page “Meteo Meduse” to replace the app. Species of gelatinous macrozooplancton including Cnidaria, Ctenophora, and Thaliacea, have been sighted by citizens recording date of observation, species name or genus, location, abundance as number of individuals per square meter, coordinates and a picture. We validate about 6000 records of bloom events from 2009-2017 and the collection is still continuing by email and the fb page.
Data and resources
Additional information
| Temporal extent | 2009-01-01 – 2017-01-01 |
|---|---|
| Date (publication) | 2019-09-10 |
| Status | onGoing |
| Update frequency | asNeeded |
| Metadata language | en |
| License | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 |
| Source metadata | ISO 19115 XML |
| Last updated | 2026-11-04 |
| Created | 2026-11-04 |
| API | package_show |