According to MARPOL 73/78, principles have been determined to prevent pollution of the marine environment. However, illegal discharges by ships above the permitted limits in prohibited areas persist. The protection of coasts and marine waters faces complex and multifaceted challenges. The marine and coastal ecosystems are especially threatened by sea-based contaminants of anthropogenic actions. Therefore, the 2002 EU Recommendation on Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the 2008 Marine Strategy Framework Directive have been developed in order to preserve all European coasts and marine waters.
To address these problems and support EU regulations, the idea of SMARTPOL has emerged with the aim of producing technological solutions for marine pollution detection while establishing data services which will be able to integrate with existing EU services in synergy with the European Green Deal. SMARTPOL aims to present a novel and compact pollution detection, monitoring and analysis system architecture consisting of hardware and software components in order to monitor marine fields and to detect different types of marine pollution. In sum, integration of different types of sensors (e.g. remote sensing, UAV and USV integrated IoT), development of marine pollution detection algorithms using sensor data and state-of-the-art intelligent system technologies including AI-based image processing, autonomous navigation and smart communication systems will be presented as R&I objectives of the project.
Our consortium is made of highly qualified domain expert organizations which will establish the SMARTPOL pollution detection system. The consortium has broad expertise on interface systems for data sharing to overcome lack of extensive data sharing; issues related to the reuse of public sector data and collecting data for the common good; and technical obstacles to data re-use in the marine field.
Coordinator
Prof Nurten Vardar, Yildiz Technical University, Turkey
Consortium
Yildiz Technical University, Turkey
AquaBioTech Group, Malta
Malta College of Arts, Science & Technology, Malta
INTERACTIVE, Romania
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Sirena Marine Denizcilik San Tic A Ş, Turkey