A photo from a dive can do more than sit in a camera roll. Around the Canary Islands, it is helping scientists track the sea day by day.
That is the aim of RedPROMAR, an EU project that asks members of the public to upload photos of what they find in the sea around the Canary Islands. The project has logged more than 85,000 recorded and validated sightings in the waters of the so called Lucky Islands, or Macaronesia, and scientists have recorded more than 5,000 species of living organisms in this part of the North Atlantic.
Dennis Rabeling, a diving instructor at Euro-Divers Lanzarote, is one of the project’s main contributors. He dives every day and uploads thousands of photos of marine flora and fauna to the website of the European project, which is co-funded by the Government of the Canary Islands.
He has contributed to the discovery of three species previously unknown in the Canary Islands. One of them is named after him, Gibberula Dennisi.
“With RedPROMAR, if you upload your photos, you become another pair of eyes on the water. In this way, scientists can identify new species that we did not previously know lived here. Today, during a thirty-minute dive, we saw around twenty or thirty species, perhaps even more,” he explains.
The project also links marine education with schools. This year, secondary school pupils from Juan Francisco Rodríguez García’s class at IES Yaiza studied how human activities affect the marine environment, recorded a podcast on tropicalisation and its consequences, and took a field trip to Órzola in the north of Lanzarote to learn in situ which species live in the sea and how RedPROMAR works.
Aroa, one of the pupils, said: “I didn’t even know most of the species. I hadn’t heard those names before at all. Take the manatee, for example. When an animal tries to bother it, it releases a kind of purple ink to scare it away. It’s really amazing.”
The project has a total budget of just under two million euros. Of that, 85 percent has been funded by the European Cohesion Policy and 15 percent by the Canary Islands Government.
RedPROMAR began in the Canary Islands and has since expanded to Cape Verde, Madeira and the Azores. Each geotagged photo is checked by a team of experts.
Marc Martín Sola, a marine biologist at Gesplan and a technician with RedPROMAR, said “citizen science data is like a jigsaw puzzle, in which observers provide us with small pieces that, taken individually, may not make sense”, but when put together, they are valuable to the scientific community and to the authorities.
The platform also serves as an early warning system for the arrival of alien species and the spread of species linked to human activity or climate change.
“There are specific times when we receive a lot of reports, a lot of sightings of a particular species, and this usually coincides with ‘arribazones’ (washed ashore), the mass arrival of organisms, whether alive or dead, on the coast,” Marc said. “In 2024, we had more than a hundred sightings in just a few months.
“Citizen science enables us to detect and record these sudden surges that might otherwise go unnoticed by the scientific community and thus keep a record of when and where they have occurred,” he concludes.
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