Natusfera: a new platform to integrate citizen science approaches for monitoring marine ecosystems

Marine ecosystems are characterized by an extraordinary mix of human activities, e.g.: tourism, fishing and industry (petrochemical plants and aquaculture, etc.). New policies concerning environmental resources should have citizens' support and consider public attitudes from the beginning. The development of these policies is becoming more complex with larger datasets required to support the assessment of impacts on whole ecosystems over long periods of time. Access to the considerable funding needed for data collection is limited, so it is important to look at new cost‐effective ways of obtaining and processing environmental data. Citizen science has the potential to increase the knowledge base about marine ecosystems through the participation of people with no specific scientific training to collect and analyze large data sets. In this contribution we introduce the new, open citizen science platform called >Natusfera> (natusfera.gbif.es). Inspired by the existing platform iNaturalist, one of the main goals of this new platform is to facilitate the participation of any community interested in collaborating in environmental monitoring, independently of the community size and the capabilities of their members. To do so, the Natusfera development has been conceived to break three main potential barriers: (1) Technological barriers. Communities will not require having ICT expertise in the group to run Natusfera and to adapt it to their particular interest. (2) Knowledge barriers. Communities may start participating even if they do not have the expertise to identify/interpret their own observations. (3) Linguistic barriers. The users will be able to choose freely the language to participate and exchange information in Natusfera. At present the platform is available in five languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Euskera. The platform is now being adapted to support as many languages as possible using a system for collaborative translation. As examples of mana