With Month 18, the activities for Work Package 8 have been concluded and all its objectives achieved. In particular, the NAUTILOS data infrastructure was designed, deployed, tested and it is now operational. The system is hosting both a private area in which internal, intermediate, preliminary products are consumable by and for NAUTILOS scopes, and a public one in which any stakeholder can consume NAUTILOS public products.

Another valuable achievement from WP8, concerns the design and development of the Graphical User Interface on the NAUTILOS web portal that is now operational. Several tools and services for the visualisation and download of data are available through the GUI.

In addition, various tools and devices for Citizen Science activities have been designed and developed. The first sample is the NAUTILOS CS mobile phone App which has been provided to CS partners to be used in the foreseen different CS campaigns, providing the interface and tools for several different scenarios: from the CS plastics-related campaigns in WP 12 – Task 12.2, to the activities of WP10 – Task 10.4, namely the Divers’ campaigns, the Crowdsourcing for visual marine image annotations, and the Algal bloom related campaigns. Concerning the devices, two distinct devices have been designed and developed: the first one is a smartphone Near-Infrared (NIR) scanner is used to establish the polymer type of plastic fragments, specifically where other identification is not possible. The scanner is especially suited for the further reporting of meso-litter (2.5 cm – 5 mm) which are often are mistaken for food by marine species. The second device is a portable microscope working with a smartphone and allowing to collect and analyse water samples allowing for an easy and supervised collection of high-quality sample picture coupled with complementary metadata.

Other two tasks of WP8, performed different activities: in Task 8.3 data retrieval algorithms and models were adapted to NAUTILOS requirements. The models for the three NAUTILOS study cases (UALG for the SouthWest Iberia, HCMR-IO for the Mediterranean Sea and, NIVA for the Hardanger Fjord System) are being run to create the Nature Run (NR) results. Ensuing activities on modelling are in progress as the main core of Work Package 9.

In Task 8.5, the definition and development of different algorithms selected for automatic image classification was performed. These algorithms have been designed in connection with diverse environmental domains identified with the following problems: i) categorisation of underwater images concerning benthic sessile organisms in collaboration with HCMR-IMBBC, which could have consequences also in the CS activities; ii) the detection and counting of specific seafloor fauna from underwater seafloor images in connection with CNR-IRBIM; c) the analysis of satellite imageries, with a particular reference to Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) has been developed, in connection with UALG, as being central to the analysis of an environmental problem concerning the identification of upwelling regimes.