Distributed Instrumentation and Geographic Information System for Dolphins' Environment Assessment

Dolphins' environment assessment is an activity able to contribute to the reduction of their mortality especially in regions with a reduced number of individuals such as on the Sado Estuary area. Optimized field distributed instrumentation for water quality parameter measurement and underwater acoustic sound measurement provides important data that can be used for advanced data analysis of dolphins' environment. The purpose of the paper is to report the work developed in the areas of distributed instrumentation and geographic information systems for dolphins' environment assessment. The architecture of the overall system is based on primary monitoring nodes with embedded servers that receive data from multi-parameter water quality sensing units, from a GPS unit and from a hydrophone. The received data is wireless transmitted to a PC based base unit where an advanced processing block and the geographic information system (GIS) are implemented assuring on-line environment assessment through dynamic web pages. GIS's database capabilities assure that postprocessing tasks such as dolphin's sound recognition or water quality data mapping can be easily implemented.