Capacity building, knowledge and information sharing to address the marine invasive alien species threats are of major importance in terms of protecting marine ecosystems. 

The project initiated national scale capacity building activities via a scientific conference, which was organized between 21-23 November 2022 in Antalya, to discuss how to overcome the adverse impact of marine invasive alien species on ecology, livelihoods, economy and public health in Türkiye. Bringing together all the stakeholders working in this field, the conference served as a platform to share information on the ecological and economic effects of marine invasive species and the activities to eradicate, mitigate, and control them in the country and at a global level. Presentations by renowned experts focused on the destruction caused by lionfish, water hyacinth, rapa whelk and other species. This conference also acted as one of the significant steps towards developing the national policy in combating these species, as the solutions discussed at the conference stood out to guide enhancing the resilience of marine and coastal ecosystems. MarIAS project also organized a follow-up International Symposium on Ballast Water and Biofouling Management in Invasive Alien Species Prevention and Control on 28-30 November 2023 in Antalya.

The Turkish National Invasive Alien Species Data and Information System (TurIST) has been designed in line with the findings of the conferences and stakeholder consultations and launched in 2024 as a database covering 181 different species, to help scientists and policymakers by showing where invasive alien species are congregating and measuring the ecological, economic and social damage they cause. TurIST is expected to facilitate international cooperation to enable joint action aimed at solving the common problem. The real-time database will continuously receive data from fishers and local NGOs to provide experts and policymakers with up-to-date information. 

In the meantime, Biosecurity and Quarantine Mechanisms Guidelines were produced for critical sectors, and serial trainings were held for fishers, divers, and marine transport sector representatives with the participation of governmental institutions, Turkish Coast Guard, NGOs, and local communities at the pilot sites, including fishermen, Central Union of Fisheries Cooperatives, divers, aquaculture, commercial boating, and maritime transport sector representatives, and the Women Fishing Association. The trainings aimed to increase knowledge and awareness on IAS threats, impacts, mitigation measures, and best practices.

The project also invested in raising awareness of invasive alien species in schools and the preparation of primary and secondary school lesson plans. In the 2022-2023 academic year, around 9,000 students working with 300 teachers were reached, highlighting the adverse effects caused by marine invasive alien species on ecology, economy and public health. 

This building block focuses on the establishment of strong partnerships between academic institutions (Universidad Politécnica de Yucatán), local governments (Secretaría de Desarrollo de Sustentable del Estado de Yucatán), and conservation organizations (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources), private sector (Huawei), and local communities (Dzilam de Bravo) to enhance the collection and analysis of biodiversity data, access to technological infrastructure, government program instrumentation and application, and local ownership and execution.

Dynamic risk maps, built using GIS and geospatial analysis, identify high-risk areas and guide resource allocation. This tool can be used for urban planning, disaster risk reduction, or managing natural resources like water or land.

The system combines data from drones, satellites, camera traps, and geospatial tools to create a comprehensive monitoring framework. This approach can be adapted for other environmental challenges, such as flood monitoring, by integrating relevant data sources specific to those contexts.

Once plants have been collected, they are transferred to our nursery for propagation. We are seeing increased effectiveness of these methods with freshly collected seeds and cuttings.

The Mamba tool allows us to collect from species we have identified in the previous step.

Drone tools have been instrumental as a first step in the assessment of cliff floras. We can now map the distribution and abundance of critically endangered endemic cliff species and expedite their conservation. Field surveys have been conducted in Hawaii, the Republic of Palau, and Madeira (Portugal) with extremely positive results.

Amphibians are more threatened and are declining more rapidly than either birds or mammals. Amphibian populations are decreasing due to multiple factors, such as climate change, the chytrid fungus, and other anthropogenic factors such as species trafficking. However, the level of threat to amphibians is undoubtedly underestimated because 1294 species (22.5%) are too poorly known to assess, as compared with only 78 birds (0.8%) (Stuart et al., 2004). 

This knowledge deficit underscores the vital importance of educational tools like Ribbit in democratizing scientific research. By lowering barriers to ecological monitoring, apps like Ribbit transform passive observers into active conservation participants. Educational technologies enable citizen scientists to directly contribute to understanding and protecting vulnerable ecosystems, addressing critical research limitations through expanded data collection in under-researched regions.

These innovative platforms increase public awareness about biodiversity challenges while providing accessible pathways for scientific engagement. Unlike bird-focused apps with well-established research infrastructures, anuran conservation has lacked comprehensive citizen science platforms. Ribbit fills this critical gap by empowering individuals to become crucial contributors to amphibian research, turning the tide on data deficiency and supporting global conservation efforts through collaborative, technology-enabled environmental stewardship.

Conserving ecosystems is key to curbing climate change, and maintaining ecosystem services, which are closely linked to over 50% of the world’s GDP. Over 1 million species face the threat of extinction this century: however, selecting which areas to conserve is challenging with the existing data gap, which is biased towards observations in the global north. Increasing the amount of biodiversity data in the Global South is critical in the conservation of endangered species, found at high density in biodiversity hotspots in the Global South. Amphibians are ideal for acoustic identification due to their diverse vocalizations and are crucial ecosystem indicators (Estes-Zumpf et al., 2022), with over 40% of species at risk of extinction (Cañas et al., 2023). Increasing labeled data for the more than 7,000 amphibian species worldwide would enhance conservation efforts and reduce knowledge gaps in vulnerable ecosystems. By using a citizen science platform to aide in the mitigation of biodiversity loss, we help establish local environmental stewardship of these critical habitats.

Other citizen apps have shown the potential that citizen science has on mitigating biodiversity loss. eBird, the largest citizen science project related to biodiversity, has 100 million bird observations from users around the world. These observations help to "document the distribution, abundance, habitat use and bird trends through collected species list, within a simple scientific framework." (Sánchez-Clavijo et. al., 2024).  

iNaturalist, another citizen science app, that uses computer vision algorithms for species identification, has also proven successful in mitigating biodiversity loss. To date, the app has over 200,000,000 observations, with 6 million observations per month, globally. On iNaturalist, research-grade observations are shared with GBIF, which in turn uses that knowledge for policy decisions, research, and community building (GBIF, 2023). 

Currently, our app identifies 71 species of frogs and toads, worldwide. Though many of them are identified as least concern (LC) under the IUCN, we do have one IUCN endangered species, the Southern Bell Frog (Ranoidea raniformis). This lack of threatened species included, underscores the need for diverse practitioners to participate in bioacoustic ecological monitoring. Increasing data points on vulnerable species can serve to inform policy decisions using data-driven insights. 

Citizen science apps have been shown to aid in biodiversity monitoring while engaging nature enthusiasts (Callaghan et al., 2019). For instance,  FrogID, an app by the Australian Museum, allows users to record frog calls whose identity is verified by human validators. To date, FrogID has published papers related to monitoring invasive species (Rowley and Callaghan, 2023), informing IUCN red list assessments (Gallagher et al., 2024), assessing fire impacts (Mitchell et. al., 2023), understanding urbanization impacts (Callaghan et al., 2020) and studying frog call behavior (Liu et al., 2022). Our goal is to achieve similar results with Ribbit, with anuran species around the world, and in a shorter time frame. To date, the FrogID team has a backlog of over 18,000 calls, which could be greatly reduced with our app, since the processing time is greatly reduced with the implementation of machine learning algorithms. 

During the first round of beta testing of our app, 50 users submitted recordings for identification. Their feedback has been positive: subject matter experts have pointed out that the species they recorded matched the one predicted by Ribbit, and nature enthusiasts have enjoyed the "Frog of the Day" feature introducing them to a new anuran species or allowing them to re-acquaint with familiar anurans through name and most common vocalization of the species.