CIIMAR has a new project in partnership with INESC TEC, IPMA and MARE – IPLeiria that aims to develop an innovative multitrophic autonomous system with adequate sensors to improve integrated physical – chemical and biological monitoring of the marine environment.

The MarinEye project, financed by EEA Grants, started from the idea that "life on earth is dependent on ocean processes which are responsible for most of the available oxygen on earth, for regulating the weather and for providing various living and non-living resources such as food, energy, transport or medicines.” In this sense, it is "imperative to increase our knowledge of the oceans and to investigate how marine organisms interact with each other and with the surrounding environment, to understand how the stability of the oceans can be affected by - these processes," explains Catarina Magalhães, researcher at CIIMAR and project coordinator.

Four separate modules - one multisensor system, an autonomous filtration system, a high resolution imaging system and an acoustic system, will be conjugated in the MarinEye prototype. A software will be associated to this prototype to visualize the data as well as to develop a series of models for integration and identification of the interrelationships among the different parameters.

The CIIMAR team involved on the developing and coordination of MarinEye is composed by Ana Paula Mucha, Marisa Almeida, Sandra Ramos, Fátima Carvalho, Hugo Ribeiro and Catarina Magalhães from EcoBioTec Lab and Isabel Azevedo and Teresa Borges from BIOCOAST lab.