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Environment

 

The oceans and seas provide society with a rich range of economic, social and cultural benefits, including food, energy, trade routes and tourism. Society's impact on the marine environment, combined with climate change, threatens the oceans and seas and the services they provide. It is essential to understand these changes to be able to respond to them; marine science and applications is the key to doing so.

 

Combined international, European and national efforts have focused on problems of managing man’s impacts on the world’s natural resources. These have resulted in improvements in the legislative, policy and management tools now available to manage marine resources, with parallel improvements in the skills of those with the responsibility to deliver them.

 

Now, more than ever before, a robust science evidence base is required to underpin the process of evaluating different management options and to integrate the ecosystem approach into decision making. Familiar tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment, increasingly rely on predictive modelling of coastal and ecosystem processes to weigh the pros and cons of different management options. Novel tools and technology are constantly in development, to address unique and challenging problems facing regulators and coastal managers.

 

Environmental scientists are becoming increasingly sought after and new knowledge and technologies are opening up new opportunities, such as the development of new medicines, tidal energy schemes, applications for quality monitoring of the marine environment.

 

For example integrated management of coastal areas requires long-term and real-time environmental monitoring to provide continuous flows of data that can be easily accessed. In addition to monitoring needs, it is clear that the development of energy at sites with recognised resources also requires intensive data collection to characterize the resource before the design of arrays of energy converters can be progressed.

 

Cabled seafloor observatories are the emerging technology capable of providing an effective, high-bandwidth, powered infrastructure for real-time observations, but they need to be adapted to the needs of end users to support effectively the existing buoyed networks and remote sensing. Cabled observatories allow deployment of arrays of sensors to obtain specific types of information, e.g. pCO₂ sensor to support CCS, or acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) to complement data on currents for tidal devices.

 

PML Applications is the coordinator in a project involved with implementing a pilot cabled sea-floor sensor network to monitor marine ecosystem state and processes, targeting both energy development and marine monitoring sectors. For further detail please visit: the MeDON project website: http://www.medon.info.