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UK volunteers help build a new living map of the nation's seaweed

Thousands of sightings collected through citizen science are powering an interactive map that helps researchers understand how coastal ecosystems are changing.

By THE TEA · 31 August 2026

UK volunteers help build a new living map of the nation's seaweed Image: Marine Conservation SocietyOriginal source

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Hundreds of volunteers and thousands of shoreline observations are helping build a new picture of how seaweed communities are changing around the UK and Ireland.

An interactive map developed using data from the Big Seaweed Search brings individual sightings together into a living record of coastal ecosystems.

The citizen-science project is run by the Marine Society and Natural History Museum, with volunteers monitoring 14 species. Amazon Web Services helped build the new map.

Those observations give information at a scale that would be difficult to collect through professional surveys alone, while giving members of the public a direct role in understanding the health of their coastline.