The Oceanography Malta Research Group (OMRG) coordinates a total of three national citizen science campaign, as follows:
making the research group, Malta’s foremost entity for the conduction of marine-oriented citizen science campaigns. The three campaigns are supported by the International Ocean Institute (IOI), the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA) as well as the Environment and Resources Authority (ERA). Through these campaigns, the OMRG regularly liaises with a broad array of marine and maritime stakeholders, promoting good ocean literacy practice, consistent with the targets of the UN’s Ocean Sciences Decade (2021-2030).
A new campaign will be launched shortly within the ANDROMEDA project. This will see the delivery of a citizen science smart phone app which automates the characterisation of photographed microplastics through an inbuilt algorithm, thus deploying Artificial Intelligence (Image Analysis) for environmental management purposes. The recorded microplastic images will in fact be stored in a repository based on University of Malta servers. The rationale behind the smart phone app development was elucidated in a previously-published paper involving the University of Malta staff engaged on the project and which had previously been featured in Newspoint.
