Recreational marine citizen science: implications for conservation management and environmental education

Collaborations between scientists and volunteers enable large spatial and temporal scales monitoring, that are essential to understand current changes in the ecosystem and allow decision and policy-makers to enhance the protection and restoration of coastal resources, as well as to plan more sustainable environmental uses. These interactions also provide important indirect benefits, promoting community environmental awareness and education. The project “STE: SCUBA Tourism for the Environment” uses a standardized methodology (Recreational Citizen Science) to collect data on the status of the Red Sea coral reef biodiversity. This approach uses a survey protocol based on casual diver observations, allowing divers to carry out normal recreational activities during their reef visits and ensured the reliability of collected data through standardized data collection. The volunteer data-based biodiversity index have detected spatial trends, providing useful information on environmental conditions and effectiveness of current conservation actions for the local environmental managers. The volunteer environmental awareness has been quantitatively evaluated before and after the project participation, showing the effectiveness of the project to modify the volunteer environmental beliefs