Coastal Environment Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Coastal sites represent very vulnerable environments, not only because they are the water–land interface, but also due to the variety and richness of anthropic activities they host, which that directly or indirectly involve the use of marine or fresh waters (shipyards, maritime transports, aquaculture, fisheries, recreational activities, and so on).

The exploitation of the precious resources of coastal environments is disciplined in the framework of national and international environment protection laws and directives that require a site characterization involving interdisciplinary research activities, through the integration of geology, physics, biology, zoology, chemistry, engineering, etc.

Anthropic activities, with their consequent traffic of ships, cars, and trucks, negatively influence air quality or pollute water bodies; detrimental effects are evident, taking into consideration, among others, the amount of shipyard wastes, aquaculture/fishery wastes, cooling water from industrial plants, and fresh water and sewage effluents released into the environment.

In the last thirty years, a special research interest on coastal advanced monitoring systems has arisen, stimulated by the above-mentioned laws and directives and enabled by the progress in data acquisition and transmission electronic devices that have allowed us to set up and improve low-cost monitoring networks.

Rapid methods and automatic instruments for the detection of microbial and chemical pollutants have been developed and are now in use to assess, almost in real time, the water status; at the same time, autonomous marine vehicles enable studying remote sites which are difficult to be reached; drones can fly over extended study areas to monitor their littoral geomorphology, also hosting airborne instruments for remote sensing, and a great effort is being made both to develop cost-effective technologies and to implement coastal integrated monitoring systems.

This Special Issue aims at hosting contributions on the state-of-the-art of coastal monitoring, focusing on instrumentation development and perspectives; papers dealing with the assessment of environmental status and case studies are also welcome.

Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Zappalà
Prof. Dr. Marco Marcelli
Guest Editors

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