Jelly-Fish Monitoring and Forecasting

Prime Contractor
StarLab (Spain)

Contact
Laia Romero - laia.romero@starlab.es

Partners
Techworks (Ireland), CMIMA (the Mediterranean Environment and Marine Centre) (Spain)

Users
Barcelona City Council, The Catalan Water Agency, The Spanish Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture, The Spanish Ministry of Environment, The Tour Operators Initiative (Spain)

Main Aims / Objectives
Demonstrate the possibility to provide prototype warning and forecasting services to the tourism and aquaculture industry on the movement of water masses containing high concentrations of harmful jellyfish in order to minimise economic losses resulting from lost aquaculture stock and reduced leisure activity

Main Services

Prediction of occurrence of jellyfish as a function of environmental conditions.

This is based on neural network techniques using ENVISAT MERIS and AATSR as the main sources.

Starlab is focusing on the extraction of water mass delineation from ocean color and SST data and the development of a prediction model based on oceanographic conditions and jellyfish ecology. CMIMA is focusing on the deployment of an in-situ boat campaign for data collection and the validation of the jellyfish prediction model outputs in the Mediterranean, while Techworks Marine are mainly responsible for the in-situ data segment in Ireland. The services cover initially the NW Mediterranean and the NE Atlantic regions, but may be extended later.