About 2,000 nautical miles in seven days to monitor cetaceans and sea turtles along fixed transepts in the southern Tyrrhenian and in the canals of Sardinia and Sicily
Multidisciplinary monitoring will start this week, within the LIFE Conceptu maris project, coordinated by ISPRA, which sees the joint presence of entities such as the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station, the University of Palermo and the University of Milan Biccoca.
The monitoring is carried out directly by a passenger ferry of the Grimaldi Lines company, which participates in the project, and equipped as a research laboratory. In fact, in addition to collecting visual data on cetaceans and turtles, species protected at European level by the Habitats Directive, and on their main threats, such as plastics in the sea, data will be jointly collected through environmental DNA (e-Dna), isotopes and the physical parameters. The ferry for the occasion was in fact equipped to be able to collect water directly from the sea and to accommodate filtering and storage machinery.
Daily updates of the logbook will be posted on the project's social profiles
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The study area was chosen for the lack of information on the investigated species and for the number of different habitat types present; the joint research protocol will then be transferred and tested also in other marinas such as the Pelagos sanctuary, the Tuscan Archipelago, the Adrion region, the cetacean migration corridor in Spain.
The LIFE project, in which the Universities of Turin and Valencia, the CIMA Foundation, the CMCC, the Marine Protected Area of Capo Carbonara, the Ecoocean and Triton associations also participate and which see the participation of shipping companies such as Grimaldi- Minoan, Corsica-Sardinia ferries, Tirrenia and Balearia will be presented to the public in a meeting on 13 and 14 October in Rome.