Ocean acidification poses multiple challenges for coral reefs on molecular to ecological scales, yet previous experimental studies of the impact of projected CO2 concentrations have mostly been done in aquarium systems with corals removed from their natural ecosystem and placed under artificial light and seawater conditions. The Coral–Proto Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment System (CP-FOCE) uses a network of sensors to monitor conditions within each flume and maintain experimental pH as an offset from environmental pH using feedback control on the injection of low pH seawater. Carbonate chemistry conditions maintained in the −0.06 and −0.22 pH offset treatments were significantly different than environmental conditions. The results from this short-term experiment suggest that the CP-FOCE is an important new experimental system to study in situ impacts of ocean acidification on coral reef ecosystems.

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Smart Ocean Environments are currently considered a key factor to connect the physical world with the information world. A Smart Ocean Environment can be defined as the combination of a physical environment, a collection of marine instruments gathering heterogeneous data from the environment, an infrastructure for data management and a connectivity solution to convey data from instruments to the Smart Space [1]. Also the collected information is stored in the Smart Space and available in the Web in an interoperable format. Standards such as IEEE-1451 [2] and OGC Sensor Web Enablement (OGC SWE) [3] are used to provide instrument descriptions, capabilities, properties, and data structures produced by the instruments. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of PUCK protocol [4] and Zeroconf protocol [5] in Smart Ethernet embedded systems.These protocols enable observing systems to manage very diverse instruments as well as to acquire, process, and interpret their data in a uniform and automated manner.

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Ocean acidification is driven by increasing atmospheric CO 2 and represents a key threat to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and other coral reefs globally. Previous investigations have depended on studies in aquaria that are compromised by reduced ecological complexity and buffering capacity, and problems associated with containment. These aquaria studies also include artifacts such as artificial flow, light, temperature, and water quality conditions. In order to avoid these issues a new technology was needed for in situ science. This need was the driver behind development of the Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment (FOCE) approach. FOCE is similar in approach to the Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiments pursued on land for almost two decades. FOCE as a systems concept was developed at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to perform controlled in situ studies on the effects of increased carbon dioxide on ocean environments. FOCE systems inject carbon dioxide enriched water into the desired control volume to lower the environmental pH to a specified value.