Coastal waters monitoring
With an accelerated degree of coastal urbanization comes a large variety of stressors. Adequate large-scale surveillance systems are needed to ensure the security of intense marine trade and transport, to meet the criteria in public health, and to preserve the vital marine ecosystems. Satellite imagery and its adaptivity represents a perfect match for the task.
Monitoring inland water bodies
Unlike oceans and seas, inland water bodies have significantly lower auto-purification properties. Due to the high anthropogenic impact, such as wastewater discharge or minerals and nutrients inflow by nearby agriculture, many inland water bodies are dealing with severe eutrophication. Earth Observation data provide systematic spatial-temporal analysis of the water quality over a large number of rivers, lakes and drinking water reservoirs.
Aquaculture is a fast-growing field in food production. Its efficiency relies heavily on the status of aquatic systems where the farms are located. Monitoring and maintaining the high quality of water is thus of the paramount importance. Remote sensing is readily coupled with sampling and forecasting techniques to provide a timely estimate of relevant water constituents.
With the majority of worlds tourism being directed towards the coastal areas, the great challenge for the sustainability of this branch of the economy is to ensure the high quality of water. Earth Observation provides means for the frequent monitoring of water quality on large scale while minimizing the expenses.
Satellite-based bathymetry represents the latest tool to map the depth of shallow waters. Compared to other techniques, the costs of creating truncated bathymetric charts of shallow waters with the resolution of 10 m (or with even higher resolution) are substantially lower. Satellite-based bathymetry is especially useful in the study of crystal-clear coastal waters such as Adriatic or Ionian Seas.
The blue economy is the counterpart of the green economy when it comes to exploitation of the oceans and regional seas. Blue economy sets a strong emphasis on the sustainability, in terms of economic growth and ecosystem balance of oceans and regional seas. Aquaculture, tourism, maritime transport, wastewater discharge and ecology are only a few of the many faces of the blue economy. Satellite imagery is becoming one of the integral parts of the blue economy thanks to its high spatial-temporal monitoring capability with applications in various sectors.
Solutions in coastal urbanization
When it comes to coastal urbanization, the project planning and the risk assessment are readily assisted by the remote sensing analysis. Satellite imagery can provide invaluable information in the form of the environment impact, bathymetry, or locating possible dredging sites locations, to name the few.