The Mediterranean Sea is recognized as a key component in the development, economy, and culture of European, North African, and Middle East countries. With respect to heterogeneity across the region in different sectors, Ocean Literacy, though still in its infancy, is nevertheless a requisite for a better understanding of the two-way interaction between the Sea and its people. In the present study, marine issues in relation to...

Ocean Literacy (OL) emerged in the USA in the 2000s as a concept developed for the education system aimed at teachers. In 2011, it gained the attention of European educators who formed the first OL network in Europe, the European Marine Science Educators Association (EMSEA). Parallel to that initiative, Portugal started the first initiative to adopt OL content into formal education. Since then, there has been a major shift tow...

Human activities have put the ocean under unprecedented pressure. Still, levels of public understanding about the ocean remain low. Ocean literacy is a global movement that aims to improve the understanding of the ocean and provide an incentive for positive change in people’s behavior. To date, there is no validated scale targeted to adults to measure ocean literacy that includes measuring people’s knowledge about the ocean, a...

The Mediterranean Sea is characterized by rich biodiversity, and its region hosts people living in several countries with a rich variety of cultures, but – at the same time – it is “under siege”, due to anthropogenic pressures. To address these pressures, many actions are needed aiming, among others, at establishing Ocean Literacy (OL) across the Mediterranean countries and preparing the future generation of Mediterranean Sea-...

In recent years, ocean literacy has become a global movement that connects the human dimension to the ocean and intends to be an incentive for positive change in people’s behavior. As multiple initiatives on ocean literacy have arisen, a comprehensive understanding of this topic is required to better engage the broader society. In the present study, we applied a combination of bibliometric analysis and science mapping to a dat...

Ocean Literacy (OL) has been defined as an understanding of the ocean’s influence on people and their influence on the ocean. The OL movement was born in the US and its framework consisted of seven essential principles and 45 fundamental concepts; it is now largely accepted worldwide for use in both formal (schools and universities) and non-formal (research institutes, aquaria, museums, etc.) education settings. Based on this...

We report the first record of vertical rhizome growth in the temperate seagrass Zostera marina . In a population of Z. marina occurring on subtidal sand in the Novigrad Sea (Croatia), an area subject to episodic high sediment transport, collected plants of Z. marina showed vertical rhizomes with shorter and narrower inter‐nodes (mean length = 3.4 ± 1.5 SD mm, mean width = 1.9 ± 0.3 SD mm) than those recorded for horizontal rhi...