MarCoLab Lanzarote: Replicating a Living Lab

• November 10, 2026

Replication is the least glamorous thing a research project does and close to the most important. A method that works once may have worked because of the people who built it. MarCoLab Lanzarote is where PHAROS finds out whether the Gran Canaria model travels, across 150 km of the Atlantic, to an island with a different tourism profile, a different conservation geography and institutions of its own.

Status and setup

Lanzarote is a replication Living Lab, modelled on the Gran Canaria one, and still emerging. Citizen science campaigns were set to start from January 2026. Full planning waits on formal coordination structures and on confirmation from local stakeholders. The project states that sequencing is open, and it is what separates replication from rollout.

Coordination sits with the Canary Islands Maritime Cluster, with technical support from CSIC, ICoRSA and PLOCAN, and SPEL as a local partner. The lab engages marine reserves, diving centres, waste management authorities and RedPROMAR collaborators.

Delivery follows the same framework as the demonstration sites: the five-phase PHAROS methodology adapted from the European Network of Living Labs, with monitoring and evaluation throughout, and a quadruple-helix governance model extended to a quintuple helix that treats environmental considerations as a stakeholder interest.

Five priorities are set for the island: marine biodiversity monitoring, circular economy strategies, awareness and behaviour change on blue economy issues, marine protected area themes, and the pressures created by coastal tourism.

Those last two are where Lanzarote diverges most from its parent lab. Tourism isn’t a background pressure here. It is the organising fact of the island’s economy, and it changes the calculation on everything from diver access to waste volumes.

A nature-based solution nobody designed as one

Lanzarote’s most distinctive asset is an underwater museum. Around 300 sculptures stand on the seabed at the Museo Atlántico, and over the years they have been colonised. PHAROS describes them as having become living reefs.

The site is therefore useful twice over. Ecologically, it is hard-substrate habitat with a known installation date, which is a rare thing to have. For outreach, it is somewhere people already want to go, which solves the recruitment problem most monitoring programmes struggle with.

The lab has used it accordingly. On a marine BioBlitz day at the Museo Atlántico, participants photographed algae, sponges and fish on the sculptures and uploaded what they found to MINKA, the free citizen science platform developed by Spain’s national research council.

One School is the starting line: Lanzarote’s Blue Network sets a two-year benchmark

A seminar on plastic-litter entrepreneurship, delivered in Spanish, worked through the route from recovered material to viable product. Blue Schools promotion ran through Rancho Texas Park. Colegio Arenas Internacional is currently the only Lanzarote school in the network, holding the Aquamarine Blue School distinction since 2024. The Fisher Guardians pilot launched at San Cristóbal in Gran Canaria, with island-scale action planned for Lanzarote.

One school in a network is a thin base. It is also the honest starting point and the figure to hold the lab against in two years.

From BioBlitz to Fisher Guardians: Scaling up monitoring across the Atlantic–Arctic

More BioBlitz campaigns, workshops and seminars on marine litter, the circular economy and sustainable fishing, closer engagement with the fishing community through Fisher Guardians, and wider school participation follows in the next period. Monitoring work is meant to feed ecological corridors across the Atlantic and Arctic basins, and the lab uses marine protected area platforms adapted from BLUE4ALL.

The replication question

Every replication site carries a tension worth naming. Copying a method efficiently means importing decisions somebody else made: which platforms, which themes, which partners. Yet the premise of a Living Lab is that the community defines the problem. If you inherit too much, the lab stops being a lab and turns into a delivery office.

The PHAROS framework handles this by separating the transferable layer, meaning methodology, platform and programme templates, from the local layer of scope, priorities and partners, and by making local confirmation a precondition rather than a formality. Whether that survives schedule pressure is the thing to watch.

Two gaps are still open. Published material names only general species groups, algae, sponges and fish, with no Lanzarote-specific participation or species counts, so there is no baseline yet to judge the citizen science effort against [TO CONFIRM: whether site-level counts are being collected for internal reporting]. And unlike Gran Canaria, Lanzarote has no nature-based intervention of its own recorded in the water. Its headline asset was built as art rather than as restoration, a strength for engagement and a limitation for experimental design.