Estimation of jellyfish abundance in the south-eastern Spanish coastline by using an explainable artificial intelligence model based on fuzzy logic

Jellyfish swarms have a direct negative impact on human enterprise, specially on places dependent on the sun and beach economy. The local economy and the health of bathers may be at risk from the emergence of these gelatinous organisms. Economic losses can be mitigated by monitoring the occurrence of jellyfish on the coast. Due to the lack of jellyfish data, environmental citizen science is presented as an alternative for data collection. In this study, fuzzy logic-based models have been used to modelize the knowledge from citizen comments collected by the Infomedusa app. The effect of local climatological factors such as wind speed and direction on the incidence of jellyfish on the coast was studied. The fuzzy logic-based models showed that winds perpendicular to the coast lead to a higher occurrence of jellyfish swarms in central and eastern Malaga, while winds parallel to the coast have a greater influence in the westernmost coasts. Wind speed has a different effect on jellyfish incidence depending on the study area and wind direction. Data extracted from the Infomedusa app can help to address the historical scarcity of scientific data on jellyfish. This app presents an opportunity for future studies to expand the knowledge about the occurrence of these organisms on the coasts and may contribute to the prediction of onshore arrival. ; We would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, which helped us to improve the paper's quality. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Project PID2020-119478GB-I00. ; Ciencias Agroforestales