P² ICT Lab

MONITORING THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT

The context

Smart Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Technologies (SEMAT)

The great barrier reef, one of the most precious and sensitive environmental systems, has been classified by UNESCO as a world natural masterpiece.

However, researches believe that the human impact and the climatic change is affecting the health status of the coral reef up to a point that, without any major important change, its expected lifetime should not exceed 40 years.

Effective intervention actions require first a deep quantitative study of the marine ecosystem through phenomenological measurements, accurate models and analysis of the close interactions between climatic evolution and environmental impact.

The coral reef harsh environment, its spatial area coverage and existing limited (semi)automatic technologies require a continuous human intervention in the monitoring phase which, due to cost and difficulties, have contained the phenomenological study.

Politecnico di Milano (I), initially with the University of Queensland (AUS), and now within a group encompassing Fondazione Politecnico di Milano (I), Torino wireless (I), CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, AUS), AIMS (the Australian Institute of Marine Science, AUS) and the James Cook University (AUS) are working on the SEMAT project whose aim is to provide novel technological infrastructures for an effective environmental monitoring of the marine environment.

The project is under the patronage of ABIE (Australian Business in Europe), an organisation stimulating tecno-scientific, economical, financial cooperation and partnership in high-tech initiatives between Europa and Australia.

The validity of technologies envisaged within the project is far beyond the monitoring of the great barrier reef, being able to cover a large spectra of civil and environmental monitoring applications (e.g., bridges, tunnels, roads and civil infrastructures structural monitoring, power supply distribution monitoring, civil protection and homeland security, first emergency management, etc.)

The Technology

An effective monitoring system requires a fully automated and credible technology able to carry out phenomenological data acquisition in situ (the human presence is required only during the deployment phase). The system has to cover a large area, be scalable in space, acquire sensorial information (sensors depend on the envisaged application), process the incoming data and transmit them to a remote station for aggregation and interpretation.

Existing technological solutions rely on dataloggers (devices acquiring and locally storing data) and wireless dataloggers (dataloggers broadcasting the acquired data wirelessly to a control station); such solutions only provide point-wise information, (i.e., acquire data at a given location point) without any effective ability to monitor at the area level (point versus area sampling).

The solution designed and developed at Politecnico di Milano for monitoring the great barrier reef is based on the top of research “wireless sensor network” (WSNs) technology. In WSNs a set of monitoring units (here, inserted in buoys) automatically configure themselves to generate a wireless network (in a way it is an internet with wireless connections instead of a cabled ones and small units substituting PCs). Units acquire sensorial data, process them locally and forward the processed information to a remote station for storage, further data processing, aggregation and interpretation.

Politecnico di Milano has addressed all technological aspects from the theory to the design and implementation of an innovative and credible WSN, where credible has to be intended as an effective, robust and adaptive prototypal monitoring system able to survive over time in harsh environments such as the marine environment is. Problems related to data acquisition, intelligent embedded systems, adaptive communication protocols, realtime data storage and visualisation of large data volumes, fault tolerance and robustness at unit and network level, power consumption and energy management have been addressed and solved. A novel power supply system based on effective solar energy harvesting mechanisms plus an optimal management of the energy in accumulation means has been suggested and completes the apparatus.

Scaling in technology will reduce cost, size and improve performance, hence leading to extremely tiny units providing a pervasive monitoring of the human environment (smart dust concept).

The Current Deployment

The system of sensors and communication buoys (10 in the current deployment) has been deployed at Moreton Bay, Brisbane, AUS on November the 18th. The WSN system (continuously active for more than 5 days) delivered temperature and solar radiation data as the initial configuration of sensors. Data cover scales of time and space, information that has, until now, been unavailable due to cost, technical feasibility, or a combination of the two.

Results and Implications

The new sensor system has lead to the following direct outcomes:

1. ability to monitor the marine environment at multiple scales simultaneously so that it is both possible to validate existing models as well as define the future of management focussed modelling for these ecosystems;

2. a significant improvement in the prediction of the occurrence of ecological phenomena such as toxic algal blooms and climate-related loss of species and overall biodiversity;

3. ability to produce integrated multi-scale models and understandings of physico-chemical conditions (for use in underpinning both research and management of coastal ecosystems);

4. availability of precious and timeliness data for the development of risk-based and early warning systems (e.g., hurricanes formation) to underpin management response and the longer-term sustainable management of coastal marine resources.

The full presentation of the project

Research group

Press Release

• Nautica - Febbraio 2008
  
  
• Espresso - gennaio 2008
  
• 7 dicembre 2007 - TGR Leonardo Raitre
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