Management and Sustainable Exploitation of Marine Environments through Smart Monitoring and Automation

Abstract

Monitoring of aquatic ecosystems has been historically accomplished by intensive campaigns of direct measurements (by probes and other boat instruments) and indirect extensive methods such as aero-photogrammetry and satellite detection. These measurements characterized the research in the last century, with significant but limited improvements within those technological boundaries. The newest advances in the field of smart devices and increased networking capabilities provided by emerging tools, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), offer increasing opportunities to provide accurate and precise measurements over larger areas. These perspectives also correspond to an increasing need to promptly respond to frequent catastrophic impacts produced by drilling stations and intense transportation activities of dangerous materials over ocean routes. The shape of coastal ecosystems continuously varies due to increasing anthropic activities and climatic changes, aside from touristic activities, industrial impacts, and conservation practices. Smart buoy networks (SBNs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and multi-sensor microsystems (MSMs) such as smart cable water (SCW) are able to learn specific patterns of ecological conditions, along with electronic “noses”, permitting them to set innovative low-cost monitoring stations reacting in real time to the signals of marine environments by autonomously adapting their monitoring programs and eventually sending alarm messages to prompt human intervention. These opportunities, according to multimodal scenarios, are dramatically changing both the coastal monitoring operations and the investigations over large oceanic areas by yielding huge amounts of information and partially computing them in order to provide intelligent responses. However, the major effects of these tools on the management of marine environments are still to be realized, and they are likely to become evident in the next decade. In this review, we examined from an ecological perspective the most striking innovations applied by various research groups around the world and analyzed their advantages and limits to depict scenarios of monitoring activities made possible for the next decade.

Improved RRT Algorithm for AUV Target Search in Unknown 3D Environment

“…To ensure that the planning result is an executable path for the AUV, it is necessary to screen the nodes, which consists of two parts: (1) The angle is projected to the plane xoy and the plane yoz, respectively, to acquire angles µ 1 and µ 2 . In addition, µ 1 and µ 2 are limited to being acute angles or the expansion is given up to avoid selecting nodes in the opposite direction to the target.…”

“…With the development of science and society, artificial intelligence, electronic computers, and other high-tech performance technologies have made continuous progress. In most countries, AUVs have become the focus of marine technology research [1,2].…”

UAV Application for Coastal Area Monitoring: A Case Study of Sant'Alessio Siculo, Sicily

“…The management and sustainable exploitation of marine [1] and coastal areas [2] requires the implementation of an effective monitoring system. This is due to their constant dynamics, mainly caused by the action of winds, waves and coastal currents, which displace a huge quantity of sediments.…”

Projection‐based throughput enhancement for 3D geographic routing technique in multi‐hop wireless networks

“…In real-life applications, network nodes are deployed in different 3D spaces, like sky space or airborne network environments and surface of the earth 13,14 ; underwater environment like sea monitoring and different underwater monitoring applications; [15][16][17][18][19][20] fire monitoring [21][22][23][24] and different other applications as well. [25][26][27][28][29][30][31] Generally, more accurate network behaviour for real-world applications is obtained using 3D embedding. 32,33 Protocols that have been designed for 2D space are not applicable directly in 3D spaces because special planer network architecture and depth perception is required.…”

“…Many position‐based geographic routing protocols 6–12 have been proposed by the researchers in the last few decades, most of those were designed for two‐dimensional spaces. In real‐life applications, network nodes are deployed in different 3D spaces, like sky space or airborne network environments and surface of the earth 13,14 ; underwater environment like sea monitoring and different underwater monitoring applications; 15–20 fire monitoring 21–24 and different other applications as well 25–31 . Generally, more accurate network behaviour for real‐world applications is obtained using 3D embedding 32,33 .…”