Marine monitoring in transition: On the verge of technological revolution?

Abstract

Efforts to renew marine ecosystem monitoring to include advanced technology and cost-effective methods have been repeatedly called for. The current environmental legislation in European Union (EU) requires also ecosystem monitoring beyond the scope of conventional methods and sampling strategies. Despite several studies showing the benefits of new methods, the progress to adopt the methods in national monitoring programmes under legal requirements has been slow. In this study, we have reviewed the current use of a set of methods in marine monitoring programmes under the EU marine strategy framework directive (MSFD), which calls for a holistic view of the marine environment and thus requires tens of monitoring parameters by different methods. Here we assess how widely the new methods are being adopted in the EU member states implementing the MSFD. Our results show a relatively high adoption rate for certain methods, while others are widely ignored. We compare the results also with the monitoring strategies of the four regional sea conventions. We argue that the adoption of methods in European and regional programmes may positively influence the national use of new methods.

Marine Non-Indigenous Species Dynamics in Time and Space within the Coastal Waters of the Republic of Ireland

“…An increasing number of modern technologies and approaches are used in monitoring marine life, including optoacoustic, omics, satellites, remote sensors, and artificial intelligence [31,32]. In the context of unwanted and non-indigenous species, DNA-based approaches have shown great promise thanks to the possibility to detect species' presence using indirect methods such as environmental DNA (eDNA) [33,34].…”