The hidden life of coastal cities: The case of the marine biodiversity in Barcelona
The article published at the blog VIMAR, by the authors Manuel Ballesteros (UB, IRBio, VIMAR), Miguel Pontes (VIMAR), Guillermo Álvarez (FECDAS) and Àlex Parera (UB), they reveal an urban biodiversity little known by the city itself: the marine biodiversity of coastal cities.
After the pandemic, the value of urban biodiversity has been enhanced, making citizens aware of the biological diversity around them and improving their quality of life.
In recent years, the knowledge of the marine biodiversity of the city of Barcelona has increased thanks to the efforts of different groups of people, from researchers, amateurs and non-profit associations that have worked to find out which marine organisms are located on the coast of the Barcelona coastline. Often these studies have been accompanied by citizen science projects such as the DIVA project (Aquatic Diversity) carried out by UB, VIMAR and volunteers from the Catalan Federation of Underwater Activities (FECDAS), the URBAMAR project carried out by Anélidas and the ICM-CSIC, and the MINKA platform, a recently created open citizen science platform to record observations of animal and/or plant biodiversity and as an open channel for citizen participation in scientific research supervised by the ICM-CSIC.
In the article we find a synthesis of the most relevant known data on the marine biodiversity of the Barcelona coastline.