Coastal lagoons are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet, being ecosystems with great environmental and socioeconomic value. However, these natural systems are especially vulnerable to climatic and anthropogenic pressures, such as intensive agriculture and urbanization pressures because of the tourist development. Despite the vulnerability and complexity of these ecosystems, there has been limited development of solution-oriented tools integrating advanced sensor research, artificial intelligence, and socio-environmental inter-relationships modelling for efficient creation of dynamic models to restore, preserve and manage their environmental sustainability. We propose to develop an integrated approach that couples novel artificial intelligence-based sensing technologies to an efficient IoT infrastructure as input data to innovative modelling of socio-environmental dynamic models to forecast short and long-term changes in lagoon state and thus inform management decisions to safeguard the ecosystem services that coastal lagoons provide. As a case study, this project focuses on Europe’s largest saltwater coastal lagoon, Mar Menor lagoon, which has suffered serious environmental degradation, and where the need for not only monitoring but also new modelling approaches are needed to support management is great, but where the availability of conventional monitoring is sparse. The project consortium includes expertise from different European countries that have been involved in the forefront of IoT infrastructure design, a state-of-the-art video based monitoring which can be fed by citizen science projects, increasing local and citizen awareness of environmental impacts, expertise in hydrologic and hydrodynamic modelling using not only physically-based approaches but also machine learning techniques, and expertise in modelling the interplay dynamics of natural and societal systems. This project promotes innovative techniques based on low-cost monitoring for creating and using improved dynamics models that can be adapted to different coastal lagoons across Europe. Additionally, to increase the project impact, we engage different stakeholders (including NGOs, Tourist associations, and Fisherman associations) and everyday citizens (including children and teenagers) in several workshops to collect data to feed our digital twin and, at the same time, increase their awareness about the Mar Menor ecological crisis.
