Biodiversity Monitoring and Awareness

The outermost regions of Europe (such us Madeira) host 80% of the biodiversity of Europe. Biodiversity monitoring and awareness are one of the major aspects in terms of research and impact in these regions.

ITI is contributing to this strategic goal by implementing novel sensing and citizen science methods to understand, study and raise awareness about the biodiversity of species of Madeira Islands. Our approach follows that many of the endemic and migrant species may be used as platforms of opportunity to gather detailed environmental information especially, because these animals can collect information from logistically difficult areas, at fine temporal and spatial resolution, and at relatively low cost.

ITI is contributing to the following goals:

i) developing and testing environmental and animal friendly low-cost sensors for monitoring biodiversity and environmental conditions;

ii) generate techniques to validate data acquired by innovative sensors against sophisticated gold standards;

iii) develop personal, business, scientific, and civic technological platforms for better understanding and situating actions, choices, and self in the context of the outermost regions of Europe.

Reaching these high level goals provides several contributions:

i) improve existing open-hardware and open-software platforms for environmental monitoring and biologging particularly for the context of coastal and oceanographic research;

ii) test low-cost communication technologies (e.g. emerging IoT standards such us lora) for near-shore and data mule strategies using maritime ships and other vehicles;

iii) deploy citizen science and other gamification approaches to leverage crowdsourcing and generalization of data gathering and classification efforts.