Abstract
The ability to detect and monitor oil spills at sea is becoming increasingly important due to the high demand of oil-based products. Remote sensing frameworks have been proven to give accurate results in case of major events; nonetheless, also medium and micro oil spills have their own importance, especially in protected areas that deserve special attention. In this paper, we propose a monitoring framework based on the collection of in situ observations and on their integration with remote sensing in order to fill out existing observational gaps. In particular, besides the data collected by special monitoring devices, in situ observations include volunteered geographical information as an additional source of valuable data. Oil spill sights, notified by volunteers through a specially-designed app, are integrated in the monitoring system and therein processed together with remote sensing data in order to proactively detect anomalous events and produce alerts. Field operational tests in two areas demonstrate the technical validity of the approach, while users’ reception testifies to its potential in raising people’s awareness on marine pollution.
Highlights
Since heavy maritime traffic and marine pollution impact the environment, the economy and the quality of life for coastal inhabitants, it is vital to prevent environmental disasters and to act immediately before pollutants are spread in a wide area
It has been decided to use nomadic devices, which have a ubiquitous diffusion around the globe; since most of them are equipped with a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, they can register the exact location of sighting and, share these data using the cellular network interacting with the Marine Information System (MIS)
Among the data integrated into the MIS, a selection has been made to extract those parts of information that might be relevant in risk analysis for oil spills and other pollution events
Summary
Since heavy maritime traffic and marine pollution impact the environment, the economy and the quality of life for coastal inhabitants, it is vital to prevent environmental disasters and to act immediately before pollutants are spread in a wide area. The main contribution of this work is to propose an integrated and interoperable system based on advanced sensing capabilities yet suitable for local authorities and stakeholders in order to monitor, detect and provide adequate response to medium and micro oil spills. To this end, we adopt the Marine Information System (MIS) presented in [8], which integrates Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Such services are capable of exploiting the computed risk maps and data gathered from volunteers for issuing alerts to local authorities.
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