Advanced monitoring systems for biological applications in marine environments

The increasing need to manage complex environmental problems demands a new approach and new technologies to provide the information required at a spatial and temporal resolution appropriate to the scales at which the biological processes occur. In particular sensor networks, now quite popular on land, still poses many difficult problems in underwater environments. In this context, it is necessary to develop an autonomous monitoring system that can be remotely interrogated and directed to address unforeseen or expected changes in such environmental conditions. This system, at the highest level, aims to provide a framework for combining observations from a wide range of different in-situ sensors and remote sensing instruments, with a long-term plan for how the network of sensing modalities will continue to evolve in terms of sensing modality, geographic location, and spatial and temporal density. The advances in sensor technology and digital electronics have made it possible to produce large amount of small tag-like sensors which integrate sensing, processing, and communication capabilities together and form an autonomous entity. To successfully use this kind of systems in under water environments, it becomes necessary to optimize the network lifetime and face the relative hindrances that such a field imposes, especially in terms of underwater information exchange.