Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OCEAN NIGHT (Ocean Night: helping society understand the importance of the marine ecosystem)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-05-01 al 2023-04-30
Life started in the oceans. Oceans cover the majority of Earth's surface and are the single largest ecosystem on the planet. Billions of humans live in coastal areas and depend on the functioning of this ecosystem to live. Unfortunately, human activities are seriously endangering the health of the marine ecosystem. It is therefore critical to raise awareness of the richness of this ecosystem, its importance, the challenges it faces and what we, as citizens of the world, can do to improve and preserve it through our personal choices. With the MCSA Researchers Night proposal Ocean Night we aim to contribute to this challenge by raising marine science literacy across the general population and promoting the appreciation of the importance of the marine ecosystem.
Our proposal brings together five research institutes run fully or jointly by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC): IMEDEA (Esporles, Mallorca; this is the coordinating institute); CEAB (Blanes, Catalunya); ICM (Barcelona, Catalunya); ICMAN (Cadiz, Andalucía); IIM (Vigo, Galicia). These institutes represent the main research institutes in Spain focussed on marine sciences. A notable aspect of the consortium is that it covers a large and diverse portion of the Spanish coastal area, including a variety of social profiles. We believe this to be an important peculiarity of the Ocean Night project, which we are leveraging -among other things- to build a better understanding of the dependence of marine literacy on social factors.
Our proposal brings together five research institutes run fully or jointly by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC): IMEDEA (Esporles, Mallorca; this is the coordinating institute); CEAB (Blanes, Catalunya); ICM (Barcelona, Catalunya); ICMAN (Cadiz, Andalucía); IIM (Vigo, Galicia). These institutes represent the main research institutes in Spain focussed on marine sciences. A notable aspect of the consortium is that it covers a large and diverse portion of the Spanish coastal area, including a variety of social profiles. We believe this to be an important peculiarity of the Ocean Night project, which we are leveraging -among other things- to build a better understanding of the dependence of marine literacy on social factors.
Our work during the first year developed along 4 main axes: Awareness, Night, Schools, Impact. These were coordinated by the Management activities.
For Awareness, we have run publicity campaigns online (e.g. Instagram, Twitter), on local radios and local TV channels; we have created a project website (oceannight.eu) which has attracted more than 10000 visits within the first five months; we have organised both online and in-person activities to promote ocean literacy, the importance of science in society and the pivotal role played by the European Union in funding science. We have then created information panels on the eight themes of the project. These are being used as “Ocean Travelling Exhibition” and are also available to download on the website.
For the Night section, we have organised researchers night activities for Ocean Night in five different locations along the Spanish coast, from the Balearic Islands all the way to Galicia. This has seen an overall participation of more than 4000 people.
Regarding the School section, we started by contacting local schools to promote the possibility to participate in educational activities within the Ocean Night project. We assembled a provisional initial list of 47 schools at different educational levels, around the five institutes of the consortium. With an official start of the project in May and the end of the school year in Spain towards the end of June, we only managed to do 12 activities in the 2021-2022 academic year. We then started again in September and, in the period leading up to end of April 2023 we had an additional 61 school visits. Altogether, we estimate that during the reporting period school activities alone involved more than 3800 pupils of ages ranging from 3 to 19. These activities focus on a variety of topics which reflect the scientific interests of the researchers in the different centres. These include: recognising biodiversity (macroscopic and microscopic); introduction to the idea of trophic levels, plankton, benthos and necton; diversity of phytoplankton; wave dynamics in coastal systems; tools for the scientific exploration of the oceans (e.g. automatic gliders). We have also presented workshops focussing on the meaning of “scientific method” (mystery boxes). Our school activities are also discussing aspects of the important societal role that oceans play (e.g. coastal economies relying on fishing, tourism, transport) as well as some of the anthropic challenges faced by the marine environment, including : overfishing, chemical pollution, plastic pollution, climate change). We strive to give a positive and engaging view of scientists as a diverse group of members of the society. Throughout the activities we often have discussions between students and scientists and try to promote science as a rewarding profession. We try to guarantee gender balance in school visits to present role models for any type of pupil.
For the Impact part, we monitor and evaluate the development and activities of the Ocean Night project. During this period, we have created a comprehensive set of impact assessment tools and started to analyse their outcomes in regards to the 2022 Researchers Night. Participants showed excellent ocean literacy, likely due to selection bias and the over-qualification of the sample. 45% of information was sourced from the internet, followed by radio (11%) and books (8%). Participants had a negative outlook on policies but recognised the need for more investment in R&I. Older participants (45+) were more likely to see S&T benefits outweighing the harm. Events and scientific communication activities also increased interest in ocean topics. Factors such as education and personality influence participants' pro-environmental awareness.
Our initial impact analysis serves as a baseline for the next steps in the period leading up to the end of the project, to understand the impact of objectives to raise young people's interest in science and research careers, spread excellent research projects, and help teachers develop a scientific approach for pupils. Further research with a larger sample size and specific research questions will be conducted, along with an analysis of questionnaires for schools, teachers, and research staff. Depending on the results, short unstructured interviews with researchers and teachers may be conducted.
For Awareness, we have run publicity campaigns online (e.g. Instagram, Twitter), on local radios and local TV channels; we have created a project website (oceannight.eu) which has attracted more than 10000 visits within the first five months; we have organised both online and in-person activities to promote ocean literacy, the importance of science in society and the pivotal role played by the European Union in funding science. We have then created information panels on the eight themes of the project. These are being used as “Ocean Travelling Exhibition” and are also available to download on the website.
For the Night section, we have organised researchers night activities for Ocean Night in five different locations along the Spanish coast, from the Balearic Islands all the way to Galicia. This has seen an overall participation of more than 4000 people.
Regarding the School section, we started by contacting local schools to promote the possibility to participate in educational activities within the Ocean Night project. We assembled a provisional initial list of 47 schools at different educational levels, around the five institutes of the consortium. With an official start of the project in May and the end of the school year in Spain towards the end of June, we only managed to do 12 activities in the 2021-2022 academic year. We then started again in September and, in the period leading up to end of April 2023 we had an additional 61 school visits. Altogether, we estimate that during the reporting period school activities alone involved more than 3800 pupils of ages ranging from 3 to 19. These activities focus on a variety of topics which reflect the scientific interests of the researchers in the different centres. These include: recognising biodiversity (macroscopic and microscopic); introduction to the idea of trophic levels, plankton, benthos and necton; diversity of phytoplankton; wave dynamics in coastal systems; tools for the scientific exploration of the oceans (e.g. automatic gliders). We have also presented workshops focussing on the meaning of “scientific method” (mystery boxes). Our school activities are also discussing aspects of the important societal role that oceans play (e.g. coastal economies relying on fishing, tourism, transport) as well as some of the anthropic challenges faced by the marine environment, including : overfishing, chemical pollution, plastic pollution, climate change). We strive to give a positive and engaging view of scientists as a diverse group of members of the society. Throughout the activities we often have discussions between students and scientists and try to promote science as a rewarding profession. We try to guarantee gender balance in school visits to present role models for any type of pupil.
For the Impact part, we monitor and evaluate the development and activities of the Ocean Night project. During this period, we have created a comprehensive set of impact assessment tools and started to analyse their outcomes in regards to the 2022 Researchers Night. Participants showed excellent ocean literacy, likely due to selection bias and the over-qualification of the sample. 45% of information was sourced from the internet, followed by radio (11%) and books (8%). Participants had a negative outlook on policies but recognised the need for more investment in R&I. Older participants (45+) were more likely to see S&T benefits outweighing the harm. Events and scientific communication activities also increased interest in ocean topics. Factors such as education and personality influence participants' pro-environmental awareness.
Our initial impact analysis serves as a baseline for the next steps in the period leading up to the end of the project, to understand the impact of objectives to raise young people's interest in science and research careers, spread excellent research projects, and help teachers develop a scientific approach for pupils. Further research with a larger sample size and specific research questions will be conducted, along with an analysis of questionnaires for schools, teachers, and research staff. Depending on the results, short unstructured interviews with researchers and teachers may be conducted.
We plan to use the impact assessment of this project as a means to evaluate, for a future publication, ocean literacy and the efficacy of public outreach and engagement activities within marine science. The Ocean Night project gives us a unique opportunity to have a single assessment structure implemented across a wide portion of the Spanish coast with a diverse social milieu. As the project runs over two years, this will allow us to gather a significant amount of data and follow in time potential developments in ocean literacy and the effectiveness of our activities.