Coastal marine ecosystems, especially coastal lagoons, are natural spaces with high ecological value that provide a wide range of goods and services to society, but at the same time they are extremely sensitive to environmental pressures derived from the exploitation of their resources. The impact of different sectors such as urban development and, particularly, industrial sectors linked to the exploitation of the surrounding land, such as mining or agriculture, condition and affect their good health and functioning with negative implications on the goods and services they provide. The socio-ecological system of the Mar Menor, unique in Europe and emblematic in the Region of Murcia, has suffered in recent years its greatest environmental crisis with enormous economic losses and natural values that have compromised its seriously threatened identity.
The different bodies with administrative powers in the Mar Menor have established and prioritized multidisciplinary programs and measures to reverse the situation as far as possible. All of them highlight the need for detailed monitoring to observe its evolution and determine the efficiency of the measures implemented for its recovery. Monitoring systems based on extensive sampling from boats have been implemented with high cost and effort and certainly limited results.
The main objective of this project is to develop an autonomous, flexible and environmentally friendly sensor platform capable of instrumenting, managing and transmitting the required data at different depths of the lagoon.
It consists of a platform (underwater profiler) with the capacity to dive and surface in a specific area, limited by the boreal circle defined by the anchorage to which the platform is linked. Once the platform is on the surface, send the instrumented data through a flexible communications infrastructure adaptable to the particular conditions of the environment, proceeding to its immersion once the transmission is completed to wait on the seabed for the next measurement cycle.