The lack of gelatinous blooms data reveals scant attention to such phenomena due to their irregular occurrence (Boero et al. 2008), to modern publication trends that give no importance to observations (Boero 2013b), to current monitoring programs that usually do not cover jellyfish (Riisgård et al. 2012) and to the lack of remote sensing tools to detect jellyfish. From 2009 the Italian project Occhio alla Medusa started involving citizens to record sightings of gelatinous organisms. In 2010 till 2015, the Italian popular science magazine FOCUS supported the campaign dedicating a webpage and releasing a smartphone app to upload records.

The Mass Mortality Events database (hereafter MME-T-MEDNet) is a collaborative initiative involving more than 30 research institutions from 10 Mediterranean countries including EU and non-EU countries. This initiative aims to facilitate the access to information (published in scientific journals and gray literature or still unpublished) related to Mediterranean Mass Mortality Events (MMEs).