Citizen Science in the Study of Marine Biodiversity: The case of Iconic and Cryptic Syngnathids

Abstract

Citizen science invites the public to participate in both scientific thinking and data collection. Citizen science adds new collaborators whose contributions help to gather or analyse data on a large scale particularly relevant for emerging questions about the distribution and abundance of organisms across space and time. Syngnathids are cryptic fishes that inhabits temperate and tropical sheltered, coastal marine waters. Pipefishes and seahorses are threatened by habitat loss and degradation. Unfortunately, data on biological and ecological aspects and population trends are rarely available in most species. More than half of the thirteen-syngnathid species inhabiting Spanish coasts are considered Data Deficient for population evaluation. Citizen science is an opportunity to improve data availability for the study of syngnathid population tendencies and monitoring. This contribution describes and discusses the approach followed by Sea Watchers citizen science platform. We analysed and discussed the data provided by the observers, and the distribution data of species based on citizen science surveillance. Citizen science achieved the expansion of spatial and temporal dataset of syngnathid distribution. However, the obtained information is affected by observers’ behaviour and suggest that the observers performed focussed surveys to find individuals of these slow motion iconic fishes, introducing biases in the data.