The community-based environmental monitoring systems as part of the research infrastructures underpinning the management of the coastal ecosystems towards the 2030 goals: the case of the citizen science observatory MINKA

The MINKA citizen science observatory is a community-based platform dedicated to the environmental data collection as a contribution for the SDGs achievement. MINKA gathered data of coastal areas around the world of trained volunteers, currently about biodiversity, through geolocalized images uploaded by citizens.The photos are validated by means of a three stages process certified by experts toward the taxonomic identification; eventually the confirmed species and genera are available to users through data information facility infrastructures, such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). At the moment the MINKA platform is under an ongoing process improving the parameters according to the Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) defined by the GOOS fundamental for assessments and saveguard ocean health. The integration of the citizen observatory MINKA with the research infrastructures of the MINKE, EU funded project focused on metrology research infrastructures to propose an innovative framework of ‘quality of oceanographic data’, underlined the complementarity of the citizen science data bringing completeness to the accuracy of the metrology research infrastructures of MINKE. Furthermore, the current requirements to fulfil the coastal ecosystem management plans, the international agreements, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or the Kunming- Montreal Global biodiversity framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) requirements are asking for data and citizen science programs are contributing to essential biodiversity variables (EBV), essential ocean variables (EOV) and for SDGs as an important data source for new and non-traditional data (Chandler, M. et al, 2017; Fritz, S. et al., 2019; Woods, S.M., 2022). Recently MINKA has been included into the UN Acceleration Actions for SDGs platform due to the contributions to the Agenda 2030, mainly SDGs 11, 14, 15 and 17.