COLLABORATE WITH SCIENCE BY BUILDING A COMMUNITY

Organise your
BioMARathon

The BioMARathon gives you the opportunity to document the marine and coastal biodiversity in your region with citizen science. Invite people in your area to learn about and document your marine and coastal biodiversity.

Use the MINKA platform to upload your observations. Each recorded observation counts and will be shared in repositories accessible to research teams and the general public.

Terms and conditions of the BioMARathon replication model

FAQs document

Why organise a BioMARathon?

Organizing a BioMARathon offers a series of advantages for research centers, companies, administration or entities

Boosting scientific research

The large-scale data collection provided by citizen science plays an essential role in advancing discoveries and understanding of our marine ecosystems.

Promoting environmental awareness

Knowledge of our marine ecosystems contributes to raising awareness about the importance of preserving them.

Create community

Engaging the local community fosters citizens’ commitment to environmental conservation.

Attracting funding

Obtaining support from institutions, companies and organisations interested in environmental conservation can enable research and conservation initiatives to continue.

Generating knowledge

To generate environmental policies based on scientific evidence.

How to organise your BioMARathon?

Plan

The duration of the event should be from the first weekend of May until October 15th.

The BioMARathon lifespan should be the same in all replication sites, to be able to compare the results between regions. Moreover, October is Ocean Cities Month.

Build your team and create your BioMARathon project in MINKA

Involve collaborating organisations, scientific teams and volunteers who can rally your community.
Download the MINKA user guides to start creating your project on the platform

Take action

Ensure that all team members and participants have the necessary training to use MINKA.

Reward and incentive systems:

Each organizer can choose whether to recognise participants for their contributions. Each organizing entity is responsible for its own incentives.
These can be based on rankings displayed on the MINKA platform for each project or on the data shown in the dashboards.
These rewards can be either prizes or other incentives.

Communicate

It is mandatory to:

Share and communicate the BioMARathon results with the ICM-CSIC team at the end of the event.
It is compulsory to use the official logos of MINKA, BioMARathon, and ICM-CSIC in all communication activities, actions and channels (It would include in training materials and other printed/digital materials).
If you want to translate the name BioMARathon to your language or adapt the BioMARathon logo, you must contact the coordinating team first at biomarato@minka-sdg.org.
MINKA observations must be properly cited as well as the MINKA Observatory according to the MINKA Citation Guidelines.

Desired conditions:

We encourage you to create your own Instagram account for each BioMARathon, to engage with your target audience and disseminate knowledge and activities.
The content creation and its management are the responsibility of each organizer for their BioMARathon social media account.
When general event information is published, it should be an interaction and mention the Instagram account @biomarathon.international

Analyse

Validate your community’s observations recorded in MINKA. You can analyse them through the available tools and organise species identification sessions to help them interpret the results!
Publish the data in open databases and disseminate your BioMArathon discoveries through your communication channels.

Get feedback

Collect feedback from participants and the team using an evaluation survey, for example.
Celebrate your community’s results and reward the winners in a virtua or face-to-face event.
Give feedback to the ICM-CSIC coordinating team. We want to know how your BioMARathon has gone!