Jellyfish Sightings Along the Italian Coastline from 2009 to 2017

The lack of gelatinous blooms data reveals scant attention to such phenomena due to their irregular occurrence (Boero et al. 2008), to modern publication trends that give no importance to observations (Boero 2013b), to current monitoring programs that usually do not cover jellyfish (Riisgård et al. 2012) and to the lack of remote sensing tools to detect jellyfish. From 2009 the Italian project Occhio alla Medusa started involving citizens to record sightings of gelatinous organisms. In 2010 till 2015, the Italian popular science magazine FOCUS supported the campaign dedicating a webpage and releasing a smartphone app to upload records.