Advanced Sensors and Robotic Platform Technologies for the Exploration and Monitoring of Marine Ecosystems and Far Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

There is a growing need for autonomous monitoring of oceans and their ecosystems in spite of climate change and rising industrial activities (e.g., oil/gas and mining extractions or fisheries). The current state-of-the-art in robotics can provide marine scientists with tools to explore and monitor ecosystems in their pristine or impacted or recovering state. There is an existing debate on which best sensor and platform solutions should be used and cooperatively combined to acquire representative multidisciplinary biological and environmental data. Moreover, due to the presence of oceans in solar systems (e.g., on icy moons of Enceladus and Europa), there may be room for the application of such monitoring solutions to the exploration of extraterrestrial life, enhancing the cooperation between marine and space agencies. In this scenario, we call for contributions on:

• Innovative sensors and their organization into smart packages for the augmented monitoring of species presence (e.g., eDNA and Passive Acoustic Monitoring, detecting organisms beyond optoacoustic imaging technologies) and their environment;
• Classic and innovative biomimetic platform designs for pelagic, benthic, surface and aerial exploration;
• New energy forms to increase operational autonomy of platforms;
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and onboard data processing for autonomous navigation and transmission strategies;
• Web solutions and architectures for data ingestion, storage and displaying in real or near-real-time;
• Web statistic tools for the online interactive time-series and multivariate statistical analysis by end-users;
• Data Science applications and relationships with large international data repositories.

Dr. Jacopo Aguzzi
Dr. Giacomo Picardi
Dr. Damianos Chatzievangelou
Dr. Simone Marini
Dr. Sascha Flögel
Dr. Sergio Stefanni
Dr. Peter Weiss
Dr. Daniel Mihai Toma
Topic Editors