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Anthropogenic underwater noise can seriously affect the marine environment and species. Although great progress has been made both from a normative and scientific point of view, public perception of this hazard is very limited. The Noixe project addresses precisely this gap and aims to raise collective awareness of this problem and the role each of us can play in reducing the impact on the environment. This paper describes what we have developed to raise knowledge and awareness of this issue through playful activities and serious games both in live situations and online. The Noixe events are divided into two sections: First, all the concepts needed to understand anthropogenic noise are explained using experiences that anyone can have in their lives. For example, it is possible to explain how noise can make a message contained in an acoustic signal unrecognizable, staging the case of a teacher explaining something to a noisy class. The second moment of a Noixe event is the serious game. Here, in a quiz-like environment, two teams compete against each other to guess a set of sounds that are initially masked by noise. The system we developed makes it possible to gradually reduce the volume of the noise and increase the volume of the sound until it becomes intelligible. The team that identifies more sounds wins. The online version of Noixe is built on a similar workflow but cannot offer all the features of the live events. In particular, it is very difficult to recreate collective experiences such as team games due to possible connectivity issues. This is why we opted for a single user mode. We have found that our approach is very effective in raising awareness on the topic of anthropogenic noise in both live and online settings. This is demonstrated by the fact that practically all Noixe participants decided to join citizen science activities on noise monitoring we later offered them. In this paper we present the technical details of the activities we have developed so that anyone can replicate and improve our work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Editors and Staff of Earth and Space Science thank the reviewers whose selfless work has significantly contributed to the publication process of papers highlighting the best research in geophysics, planetary, and space science in 2023. Peer‐reviewing is a demanding and thankless job. It is however an essential component of the scientific process, requiring the highest standards of integrity and rigor. Reviewers check data and procedures and test reproducibility of methods and results; they share their expertise to verify that the interpretations and conclusions of a paper are consistent with assumptions and existing knowledge. Without this essential work it would not be possible to trust in the scientific process. Publication of papers in a multidisciplinary journal such as Earth and Space Science, that highlights methods, instruments, data and algorithms, relies directly on the expertise of its reviewers to verify and vouch for the quality of the papers that are published. We are indebted to all our reviewers and are delighted to acknowledge them publicly in this Editorial. Plain Language Summary: The Editors and Staff of Earth and Space Science acknowledge the importance of hundreds of peer reviewers who contributed to the scientific rigor of the papers published in the journal. The Editors wish to publicly recognize the 926 reviewers who gave selflessly of their time and expertise in 2023. Key Points: The editors thank the 2023 peer reviewers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work reports on the development of a real-time vehicle sensor network (VSN) system and infrastructure devised to monitor particulate matter (PM) in urban areas within a participatory paradigm. The approach is based on the use of multiple vehicles where sensors, acquisition and transmission devices are installed. PM values are measured and transmitted using standard mobile phone networks. Given the large number of acquisition platforms needed in crowdsensing, sensors need to be low-cost (LCS). This sets limitations in the precision and accuracy of measurements that can be mitigated using statistical methods on redundant data. Once data are received, they are automatically quality controlled, processed and mapped geographically to produce easy-to-understand visualizations that are made available in almost real time through a dedicated web portal. There, end users can access current and historic data and data products. The system has been operational since 2021 and has collected over 50 billion measurements, highlighting several hotspots and trends of air pollution in the city of Trieste (north-east Italy). The study concludes that (i) this perspective allows for drastically reduced costs and considerably improves the coverage of measurements; (ii) for an urban area of approximately 100,000 square meters and 200,000 inhabitants, a large quantity of measurements can be obtained with a relatively low number (5) of public buses; (iii) a small number of private cars, although less easy to organize, can be very important to provide infills in areas where buses are not available; (iv) appropriate corrections for LCS limitations in accuracy can be calculated and applied using reference measurements taken with high-quality standardized devices and methods; and that (v) analyzing the dispersion of measurements in the designated area, it is possible to highlight trends of air pollution and possibly associate them with traffic directions. Crowdsensing and open access to air quality data can provide very useful data to the scientific community but also have great potential in fostering environmental awareness and the adoption of correct practices by the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plain Language Summary: The Editors and Staff of Earth and Space Science acknowledge the importance of hundreds of peer reviewers who contributed to the scientific rigor of the papers published in the journal. The Editors wish to publicly recognize the 839 reviewers who gave selflessly of their time and expertise in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present new advances in monitoring particulate matter (PM) in urban areas within a participatory vehicle sensor network (VSN) that exploits the use of multiple mobile low-cost IoT devices. These devices send geolocated PM measurements to an IT infrastructure and enabled us to reconstruct, in real time, the spatial and temporal distribution of pollutants in the study area in a web-based environment. The newly acquired data were integrated with independent reference measurements available from governmental environmental agencies. We deployed the infrastructure in the city of Trieste (Italy), since the beginning of 2021, with the help of several volunteers and the local transportation authority (Trieste Trasporti). By analysing the data, we delineate areas with lower air quality and identify the possible causes of these anomalies. We were able to define a belt outside the urban center where an enhanced concentration of pollutants occurs due to a higher flux of vehicular traffic that tends to jam there. Overall, our results demonstrate that this approach can be helpful in supporting urban planning and can also stimulate the community to reflect on how they can improve air quality in the area they live by reducing the use of private cars in favour of more widespread public transportation usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims at understanding whether a citizen science-based monitoring system could be adequate to detect the effects, in terms of air quality, of solid and liquid fuel combustion for household heating. Citizen science is known to be able to improve the coverage and resolution of measurements at a very low cost. On the other hand, it also has severe limitations. Since low-cost sensors are to be used, measurements are problematic in terms of precision and accuracy. In order to test these aspects, we developed a system named COCAL that supports all the phases of air quality monitoring, from data acquisition, georeferencing, transmission, and processing up to web mapping. In this work, we focus on particulate matter. To address the limitations of the citizen science approach, we carefully tested all the parts of the system and, in particular, the performances of the low-cost sensors. We highlighted that their precision is acceptable, while their accuracy is insufficient. Measurements taken within such a paradigm cannot be used, therefore, as reference values. They can be used, instead, as relative values, in order to identify and to map trends, anomalies and hotspots. We used COCAL extensively in the city of Trieste and were able to identify different behaviors in different areas of the city. In the city center, PM values increase constantly during the day. In the rural suburbs of the city, we observed that PM values are low during the day but increase very rapidly after 5 p.m. It is important to note that, in the city center, household heating is based almost completely on natural gas. In the rural areas, household heating is generally based on wood burning stoves or liquid and solid fuel. A possible explanation of the different behavior between the two areas can then be related to commuters living in the rural areas but working in the city center. When they return home in the evening, they switch on the heating systems triggering the release of large quantities of particulate matter. We were able to map peaks of particulate matter values and highlight that they are initially located within the village centers to later propagate to the areas around them. The possibility of mapping air quality with the coverage and resolution we were able to obtain within a citizen science approach is very encouraging. This can be very helpful in understanding the impact that liquid and solid fuel combustion can have on the environment and human health. In addition, we think that this opportunity can be very important considering the current geopolitical situation where a (hopefully only temporary) shift toward pollutant fuels is expected in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On behalf of the Editorial Board and Staff of Earth and Space Science, I thank the reviewers whose selfless dedication to science has ensured, once again, that the papers published in our journal in 2021 highlight the best Earth and space science in a manner that does justice to the authors and their work. All of us at Earth Peer reviewing is a demanding and often thankless job. It is however an essential component of the scientific process, ensuring the highest standards of integrity and rigor. Without the work of reviewers, who check data and procedures for possible bias and to ensure reproducibility, and who share their expertise to verify that the interpretations and conclusions of a paper are consistent with assumptions and existing knowledge, it would not be possible to trust in the scientific process. Our journal is particularly indebted to our reviewers: Earth and Space Science is a multidisciplinary journal that highlights methods, instruments, data and algorithms, and therefore we rely heavily on the direct expertise of our reviewers to verify and vouch for the quality of the papers we publish. We are indebted to all our reviewers, and we are delighted to acknowledge them publicly in this Editorial. Plain Language Summary: The Editors and Staff of Earth and Space Science acknowledge the importance of hundreds of peer reviewers who contributed to the scientific rigor of the papers published in the journal. The Editors wish to publicly recognize the 881 reviewers who gave selflessly of their time and expertise in 2021. Key Points: The editors thank the 2021 peer reviewers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key Point: The editors thank the 2020 peer reviewers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key Points: The editors thank the 2019 peer reviewers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vintage geophysical data represent a huge heritage for the whole scientific community (Sopher, 2018; Schaming et al., 2017; Diviacco et al., 2015) because, despite the antiquated acquisition methods and processing tools, they are generally characterized by high penetration and wide regional extension. Nowadays such large‐scale projects are in fact very difficult to take place, considering environmental, geopolitical, and funding issues. In addition, reprocessing vintage seismic profiles using up‐to‐date software and tools, it is now possible to further increase their original signal‐to‐noise ratio. Italian offshore areas have been widely investigated by a dense network of multichannel seismic reflection profiles, acquired by the Italian Authorities in the years 1960, 1970, and 1980 of the last century in the perspective of mineral prospecting. This asset of data has been recovered, reprocessed, and made accessible within a demanding project undertaken by Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS). The present work aims at describing the data recovery and reprocessing methodologies applied to enhance the quality of these vintage multichannel‐seismic reflection profiles, and at detailing how to access this huge dataset, that have been made compliant with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and available through the OGS‐SNAP data management web portal. Open Practices: This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.6092/SNAP.cbbba251c17b55c737836768c8737589. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EMODnet-Physics map portal (www.emodnet-physics.eu/map) provides a single point of access to in situ datasets, products and their metadata. b. EMODnet Data Ingestion The EMODnet Data Ingestion portal facilitates data producers and managers to ingest their marine datasets for further processing and publishing as open data. In the first case, binning data within cells that are delimited geographically and in time allows to statistically process data in order to retain an average value per cell which can be used for further visualization in gridded or contour maps. It allows seamless acquisition, transmission, integration, processing and visualisation/dissemination of cross-domain crowd-sensing data, while being compliant to OGC standards. [Extracted from the article]

In this framework, the integration of the SDLS web portal with GeoNetwork allows to obtain a repository and a registry of metadata in a catalogue based on INSPIRE and ISO19115-3 standards. [Extracted from the article]

Conclusions Madcrow demonstrated non only the feasibility but also the vast possibilities that the citizen science approach can have from the perspective of providing researchers with large quantities of data covering large geographical areas with very low costs. International Conference on Marine Data and Information Systems 12-14 Aprile, 2021- Online 179 Citizen science and crowdsourcing in the field of marine scientific research - the MaDCrow project Paolo Diviacco, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), pdiviacco@inogs.it Antonio Nadali, Transpobank (Italy), nadali@tbk.it Massimiliano Iurcev, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), miurcev@inogs.it Rodrigo Carbajales, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), rcarbajales@inogs.it Francesca Malfatti, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), fmalfatti@inogs.it Lorenzo Grio, Transpobank (Italy), grio@tbk.it Alessandro Busato, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), abusato@inogs.it Alessandro Pavan, OGS National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), apavan@inogs.it Massimiliano Nolich, University of Trieste (Italy), mnolich@units.it Introduction MaDCrow (Marine Data Crowdsourcing) is a marine technology research and development project co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), that aims to create an innovative technological infrastructure for the acquisition, integration and dissemination of data on the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of Trieste based on a citizen science paradigm. [Extracted from the article]

We use various geophysical datasets (multibeam and singlebeam echosounder data, sub-bottom profiling Chirp and sonar data and very high resolution boomer seismic data) along with published sedimentological data and depth data from nautical charts in order to create models of the depth of the seafloor and the base of Holocene marine sediment in the Gulf of Trieste. The two models are later used in order to calculate the thickness of marine Holocene sediment which has been depositing on the Late Pleistocene alluvial plain since the Holocene transgression in the Italian and Slovenian part of the gulf. Thicker Holocene marine sedimentary sequences averaging at around 5 meters are characteristic for the SE part of the gulf. In other parts of the gulf the Holocene marine sedimentary cover is very thin or even absent, except in close proximity of the shoreline and fluvial sediment sources, in the area of the Trezza Grande paleodelta and above topographic depressions of the Late Pleistocene base. The presented datasets available from the OGS SNAP data repository (https://doi.org/10.6092/6ad9b1e6-c977-cec9-8a2d-db10c7f90adc) represent a valuable reference for a wide variety of research disciplines dealing with the dynamic Earth system in the Gulf of Trieste and could use as a valuable tool for designing sampling and geophysical campaigns in the studied area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses three dimensional pre-processing techniques for marine very high resolution seismic data. Level of accuracy and cost-effectiveness of data acquisition technology; Methodologies for deriving corrections from data using redundancy of information contained in the first break arrival times; Absolute positioning; Shot static corrections; Geometry processing.

Marine life can be severely affected by anthropogenic underwater noise. This latter increased proportionally to the rise of human activities such as maritime traffic, marine civil engineering works, oil- and gas-related activities or offshore wind farms; so much so that, currently, it can be considered a threat to the environment. Assessing underwater noise requires quite some investments both in personnel and instrumentation. If this is affordable by several governmental and scientific organizations, this cannot be extended straightforwardly to all research initiatives or to developing countries. In addition, time and geographic coverage of monitoring can also be significantly limited by the costs of multiple installations. We explore the possibility to use a solution based on off-the-shelf and low-cost technologies combined with a scalable infrastructure developed with open-source tools only. The perspective to avoid proprietary solutions allows great flexibility in extending the current paradigm toward real-time transmission, processing, and web-based data access. Our solution has been deployed at sea in November 2020 and is providing data continuously ever since. First results from the analysis of these data allowed us to highlight several interesting abiotic and anthropogenic temporal patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the approach to handle semantics in data management. Topics mentioned include the importance of metadata in data discovery, the several layers that structure the environment of research such as information, data, and knowledge, and the use of Resource Description Framework (RDF), a document markup language, in data management.

The article reports on the development of Eurofleets Automatic Reporting System (EARS), an event log software, by European Union (EU) FP7 Projects Eurofleets and Eurofleets2, a European wide group of marine research center. Topics mentioned include the importance of EARS in data quality management, the management of completeness and accuracy of metadata, and the objectives of the European Fleet organization to improve information sharing.