The COLAPA-3D project is combining three-dimensional coastal mapping, scientific monitoring and the traditional knowledge of harvesters to understand where Azorean limpets are concentrated, where harvesting pressure is greatest and which areas may require special protection. Running through March 2028, the initiative comes as monitoring shows no generalized collapse of limpet populations across the archipelago, but does identify a significant decline in biomass on Flores that warrants continued attention.
Along the black volcanic shoreline of the Azores, limpets occupy one of those small territories where nature, food and cultural memory have met for centuries. They cling to rocks continually rewritten by tides and waves, gathered by people whose knowledge of the coast is often measured not in maps but in years of observing the sea. Now scientists want to reproduce portions of that intricate shoreline digitally, creating detailed three-dimensional models capable of revealing where limpets live, where populations are strongest, where harvesting is most intense and where conservation measures may eventually be necessary.
The initiative is called COLAPA-3D — Local Co-management of Limpets with the Support of 3D Technology and Traditional Knowledge. Launched on April 1, 2026, and scheduled to continue until March 31, 2028, the project has total funding of €201,084.98. MAR 2030 provides €140,759.49, or 70 percent, while the remaining €60,325.49 comes from the Azorean PRO-SCIENTIA program through the Regional Budget. The Gaspar Frutuoso Foundation is the principal beneficiary, Ualerson Iran Peixoto da Silva is the lead researcher, and the project is associated with OKEANOS at the University of the Azores.
Its technological premise is photogrammetry: multiple photographs taken from different angles are used to reconstruct sections of coastline digitally in considerable detail. But the purpose is not simply to create impressive images. Researchers intend to identify spatial and population patterns, sensitive habitats and areas exposed to greater harvesting pressure, turning the resulting models into practical tools for management. In principle, knowing precisely where important concentrations occur—and how those areas relate to harvesting activity—could allow protection to become more geographically precise rather than relying exclusively on broad restrictions.
COLAPA-3D arrives against a history that counsels vigilance. Official regional documentation recalls that intense harvesting for personal consumption and commercial sale once brought limpets close to disappearance on some islands, resulting in harvesting prohibitions in the Eastern and Central groups. Populations subsequently recovered and the prohibition was lifted in 1993, although various restrictions have remained. The harvesting regulations were amended again this summer through Ordinance No. 78/2026, published July 10.
Current scientific evidence, however, requires nuance. Data produced through the Azores Coastal Resources and Environments Monitoring Program, MoniCO, do not indicate a generalized collapse of the rough limpet population across the archipelago between 2022 and 2025. Flores is the significant exception: monitoring identified a statistically significant decrease in biomass there. The issue reached the Legislative Assembly through a Chega parliamentary inquiry concerning the condition of limpet stocks and management and enforcement measures. The Regional Secretariat for the Sea and Fisheries subsequently also clarified that references in the information concerned populations of juvenile limpets—individuals that had not yet reached sexual maturity—and were not evidence that juvenile limpets had been illegally harvested. That clarification did not alter the finding concerning declining biomass on Flores.
The scientific foundation is broader than COLAPA-3D itself. MoniCO, coordinated scientifically by OKEANOS and financed by the Regional Government through the Regional Directorate for Fisheries, conducts monitoring independent of commercial catches. Researchers examine populations directly in their habitats rather than relying solely on what reaches the fish market, where quantities can change because of weather, prices, harvesting effort or the number of active harvesters. During the 2025 campaign, teams sampled all nine islands, photographing, measuring and weighing both rough and smooth limpets and collecting specimens to update information about their abundance, distribution and population characteristics.
What makes COLAPA-3D particularly interesting, however, is that its concept of knowledge extends beyond the laboratory. The project specifically proposes co-developing management measures and harvesting practices with the people who gather limpets. A harvester who has worked the same coastline for decades possesses another kind of ecological archive: knowledge of productive areas, seasonal changes, accessibility, abundance and transformations observed over time. COLAPA-3D intends to place that accumulated experience beside scientific sampling and digital reconstruction rather than treating the two as competing forms of knowledge.
The final objective is to develop and test a model for local monitoring and co-management in which users of the resource participate in constructing solutions. That approach could be especially valuable for a species whose sustainability depends upon behavior at a very local scale. Closed seasons, minimum sizes, catch limits, reserves and enforcement remain essential tools, but increasingly sophisticated management may require understanding not only how many limpets exist, but exactly where they are concentrated and how human activity interacts with those places.
There is no evidence in the information presently available that Azorean limpets are undergoing an archipelago-wide collapse, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. There is instead something more useful to science: a warning from Flores, a historical memory of overexploitation, and an opportunity to improve management before warning becomes crisis.
For centuries, limpet harvesters have learned to read the coast with their eyes, hands and accumulated memory. Scientists are now teaching computers to read some of the same rocks in three dimensions. Perhaps the most promising aspect of COLAPA-3D is that it does not ask one form of knowledge to silence the other. Between the digital model and the experienced hand may lie a more enduring way of protecting a small creature that has long belonged to the taste, economy and living shoreline of the Azores.
Based on a story in Diário dos Açores-Paulo Vivieiros, director. Photos from Novidades and DA.