The First IT Systems for Ecological Online Monitoring in Water Environment

Abstract

The standard system of environmental control in water ecosystems is outdated, ecologically and technologically ineffective and it is failed for safeguard of the environment and on the way to sustainable development, in particular. Sampling is elementary in technique (grab, trawl, bathometer, etc) and weather conditioned so far and the solely manual labours for obtaining biological data are too long (up to one year in average), while the results of the standard biomonitoring are mixed and ecologically ambiguous. Online and efficient water quality control is impossible when the traditional biomonitoring technology is applied only. Moreover because of the extremely long delay (up to several years) in population or community responses any immediate and online information on the ecosystem effects of environmental changes cannot be obtained. The main disadvantages of the standard biomonitoring can be overcome when online monitoring and IT based bioindication with biosensors applied. Up-to-date biological early warning systems (BEWS) are IT -control systems for relatively stable conditions of the freshwater while the system of online biosensor monitoring (OBM) developed by our team (1985–2016) is, in fact, the first IT system for automatic online biomonitoring for marine environment. Our OBM system includes the up-to-date installation of original design, underwater behavior monitoring unit, an on-board unit with controller set and software for monitoring in real-time, storage and remote transmission to server for data processing on key algorithms of OBM technology and online bioindication. The OBM complex has been tested on the coast of the Barents Sea for three years continuously (2016–2019), and still proceeds the online monitoring.