José María Cecilia Canales

Coastal lagoons are ecosystems with important environmental and socioeconomic value. However, these natural systems are particularly vulnerable to climatic and anthropogenic pressures, such as intensive agriculture and extensive urbanization as a consequence of tourism development. Despite the vulnerability and complexity of these ecosystems, the development of intelligent applications that can facilitate real-time monitoring, analysis and management of these critical resources has been limited. In addition to being useful for policy-making procedures at multiple levels of granularity, such tools can increase local and citizen awareness of environmental impacts. This talk will introduce the progress developed in the European project SMARTLAGOON, which aims to develop a digital twin to build a systemic understanding of the socio-environmental interrelationships affecting coastal lagoons and their ecosystem. In particular, we will focus on the main research activities carried out since the beginning of the project (January 1, 2021), which are mainly based on the digitization of different variables of interest with a high spatial and temporal resolution of both the Mar Menor lagoon and its basin and the citizens living in it.