HUB Ocean and Mercuria launch ‘Citizen Sea’ – a new citizen science app to help close critical ocean data gaps.
UNITED NATIONS OCEAN CONFERENCE 2025 - NICE, FRANCE
Tuesday 10th June, 2025
HUB Ocean and Mercuria launch Citizen Sea - an innovative new app designed for everyone, enabling seafarers from diverse industries, communities worldwide and ocean enthusiasts to participate in a citizen science project committed to enhancing ocean health. https://www.hubocean.earth/citizen-sea
Kimberly Mathisen, CEO HUB Ocean
The new Citizen Sea app will enable them to photograph, upload and log sightings of marine wildlife or marine pollution directly from their phones.
Kimberly Mathisen - CEO, HUB Ocean:
“We are calling on you who work, spend time on or live by the sea to be our eyes on the ocean.
Our aim is to make it possible for anyone to use Citizen Sea to help us close some of our data gaps. Good quality data and insights are essential for planning and managing our seas better.
This new app empowers citizen scientists everywhere to use the phone in their hand to make a practical and vital contribution to help heal the ocean.”
HUB Ocean’s mission is to unlock data to heal the ocean. We deliver rich ocean insights and a cutting-edge geospatial platform.
About Citizen Sea
Citizen Sea is a new mobile app that enables anyone out at sea or along the coast to contribute marine sightings directly from their phones.
The global shipping fleet employs over 1.8 million people and 15% of the world’s population live by the coast. This is a huge untapped source of data gatherers who can be our eyes and ears on the ocean - citizen scientists for the sea.
Jo Øvstaas - Innovations Director, HUB Ocean
“The app is easy and intuitive. We are asking seafarers to keep a lookout for either marine wildlife or marine pollution, take a picture and upload it using the app to the HUB Ocean database.
You simply use the app to tag your photos with relevant observations about what you’ve spotted. Your phone’s photos contain location metadata, which means our team can pinpoint the exact location where those sightings were captured, even if they’re only uploaded when you get back to port. We then integrate these contributions into our expanding database.
We are keen to gather two specific types of sightings: Marine wildlife - such as whales, dolphins, sea birds, fish or sharks. And Marine pollution - such as debris, oil spills, plastics, old nets or submerged containers”.
Why take part?
Sightings and observations captured via Citizen Sea will enrich the data on the HUB Ocean’s Platform and help close critical gaps in ocean data.
The app will provide clear signals to the world on ocean health, and the data will seamlessly feed into the HUB Ocean platform which is used by experts across policy, academia and industry around the world striving to improve our ocean’s health.
Victoria Attwood Scott - Global Head of Corporate Responsibility and Compliance, Mercuria
“Mercuria is delighted to have worked with HUB Ocean to help make Citizen Sea a reality. Citizen science initiatives like Citizen Sea can make an invaluable contribution to our collective knowledge.
Every sighting, photograph and upload will be important and will play a vital role in creating a comprehensive crowd-sourced dataset focused on marine species and ocean pollution, helping experts make a genuine impact on ocean health and recovery.
Mercuria will be working with commercial shipping fleet operators to get Citizen Sea onto the mobile phones of their onboard crews so it’s being used every day out at sea – a brilliant way to get much-needed additional eyes and ears on the ocean.”
Industrials users
Ecowende is the first offshore wind farm developer to publicly share ecological data on a large scale. The data provided by Ecowende will come from numerous sensors in its offshore installations and stand-alone surveys. These sensors monitor a variety of species and oceanic parameters, both above and below the water, such as bird observations, bat presence, underwater telemetry and acoustic data.
Hermione van Zutphen, Ecology Programme Manager at Ecowende
Hermione van Zutphen, Ecology Programme Manager at Ecowende
“We’re excited to contribute to HUB Ocean’s Citizen Sea app to support the digital monitoring of endangered species sightings during the development of the Ecowende wind farm. As Ecowende aims to be the most ecologically friendly offshore wind farm to date, we’re proud to collaborate with HUB Ocean on this important mission.
Our offshore crews are our eyes and ears in the field — especially during the construction phase, when we are still installing a range of sensors to monitor marine life automatically once the wind farm is in operation. Our crews’ observations can now be reported directly through the Citizen Sea app, and provide valuable insights to our ecological research programme.”
---------------------------------------
Notes to editors
About HUB Ocean:
Citizen Sea has been created by HUB Ocean - an independent nonprofit collaboration hub for ocean data based in Norway.
HUB Ocean manages a unique open-source data hub, delivering rich ocean insights and a cutting-edge geospatial platform - which is used by experts, scientists and organisations to plan and manage our oceans better and ultimately improve ocean health.
HUB Ocean’s cloud-based geospatial platform provides seamless access to rich and structured ocean data from public and private sources, providing powerful analysis tools through an intuitive workspace, flexible API and Python SDK. It is entirely designed for interoperability in a federated ocean data ecosystem. https://www.hubocean.earth/citizen-sea
Contact: Vigdis.Hvaal@oceandata.earth Communications Director, HUB Ocean
About Mercuria:
The development of the Citizen Sea app has been made possible by Mercuria and Minerva Bunkering.
Minerva is a leading international provider of marine fuel supply and related service solutions to ships in port and at sea. The company procures product in bulk from diverse sources and delivers to over 600 customers across all major commercial shipping sectors including container ships, dry bulk carriers, cruise ships, tankers, and ferries.
Minerva is a 100% owned subsidiary of Mercuria Energy Group, one of the largest privately-held energy and commodities companies in the world.
Contact: Ben Jefferies - bjefferies@mercuria.com – Communications Director, Mercuria