The Pelagia Dashboard: what citizen science should actually look like.

There is a tool available right now that lets you check whether jellyfish might arrive at your chosen beach before you pack your bag and head to the coast.

It tracks real sightings from real people, connects them to live weather and ocean drift data, and generates a probability forecast for the next five days. It sends instant alerts to your phone. It can be embedded by any local council, newspaper, or tourism website that wants to use it.

And it is completely free.

It is called the Pelagia Dashboard, and it is part of the Pelagia Logbook - a citizen science project now in its second year of monitoring Pelagia noctiluca, the Mauve Stinger jellyfish, across the coastlines of Greece.

🔗 https://pelagia.mermanconservation.co.uk/

More Than a Map.

At first glance, the Pelagia Dashboard looks like a simple database with a table and a map. Look closer, and it becomes something far more significant.

Every jellyfish bloom observation submitted by a citizen is logged individually, timestamped, and displayed on the map. But the system does not stop at recording where jellyfish have been. It uses real-time weather data and satellite-derived ocean drift information to model where those jellyfish are likely to go, projecting potential movement up to five days ahead.

For anyone planning a swim, a beach holiday, a coastal activity, or a diving session, this is genuinely transformative information.

What the Dashboard Can Do?

The Pelagia Dashboard offers a level of public functionality that, to our knowledge, no other jellyfish monitoring platform in the world currently matches:

• Individual observation browsing - every sighting is accessible and explorable on its own
• 5-day drift forecasting - based on weather and ocean current data, showing where jellyfish may move next
• Live beach-level probability - a same-day estimate of the likelihood of jellyfish presence at a specific beach or area
• Proximity alerts - showing how close the nearest recorded observation is to a user's chosen location
• Telegram bot alerts - instant notifications sent to subscribers the moment a new observation enters the database

These tools are not locked behind a subscription. They are not restricted to researchers or institutions. They are open to everyone.

Built for Communities, Not Just Scientists.

One of the most deliberate design choices behind the Pelagia Dashboard is the direction of information flow.

Most citizen science platforms are built around extraction: they ask the public to contribute observations, and the data flows upward to scientists, databases, and reports. The public rarely sees anything useful in return.

The Pelagia Logbook was built differently. The premise is simple: if people are generous enough to contribute their time and observations, they deserve to receive something genuinely useful back. The Dashboard returns that value immediately, in the form of forecasts, probabilities, alerts, and maps that help ordinary people make better decisions.

This matters especially in a country like Greece, where coastal tourism is a cornerstone of the economy, and where a jellyfish bloom can affect thousands of swimmers, beach operators, and local businesses in the space of a single day.

A Free Resource for Media, Municipalities, and Tourism.

The Pelagia Dashboard goes further still for organisations and institutions.

Newspapers, regional media outlets, municipal websites, tourism platforms, and local blogs can embed the dashboard, or filtered views of it, showing only the data relevant to a specific prefecture, coastline, or town, directly into their own platforms. For free.

This means a local authority in the Cyclades can display real-time jellyfish data for its own beaches. A travel website covering the Peloponnese can embed a live map filtered to that region. A regional newspaper can give its readers a tool they will actually return to, day after day, throughout the summer.

Why This Matters?

Pelagia noctiluca blooms are not a novelty. They affect swimmers, water sports operators, fishing communities, and coastal ecosystems. Their frequency and intensity are linked to broader patterns of sea temperature, seasonal variation, and environmental change. Understanding them is not merely a scientific interest; it has direct, practical consequences for millions of people every year.

The Pelagia Logbook is building a growing, georeferenced dataset of bloom events across Greece, one that improves in quality and coverage with every new observation. But crucially, it is not waiting until the dataset is complete before offering value. The Dashboard is live, functional, and useful today.

What Citizen Science Should Be!

The Pelagia Dashboard represents a model for how citizen science projects should operate: as a genuine exchange between the public and the scientific community, where contribution is met with usefulness, and where data serves people as much as it serves research.

If you are spending time on Greek beaches this summer, or if you know someone who is, the Pelagia Dashboard is worth bookmarking.

And if you run a local media outlet, a municipal website, or a tourism platform, it is worth getting in touch.

🔗 Explore the Pelagia Dashboard: https://pelagia.mermanconservation.co.uk/

The Pelagia Logbook is a project by Merman Conservation. The Dashboard is free and open to the public.