NAUTILOS: New Approach to Underwater Technologies for Innovative, Low-cost Ocean obServation

NAUTILOS will fill in existing marine observation and modelling gaps through the development of a new generation of cost-effective sensors and samplers for physical (salinity, temperature), chemical (inorganic carbon, nutrients, oxygen), and biological (phytoplankton, zooplankton, marine mammals) essential ocean variables, in addition to micro-/nano-plastics, to improve our understanding of environmental change and anthropogenic impacts related to aquaculture, fisheries, and marine litter. Newly developed marine technologies will be integrated with different observing platforms and deployed through the use of novel approaches in a broad range of key environmental settings (e.g. from shore to deep-sea deployments) and EU policy-relevant applications:

• Fisheries & Aquaculture Observing Systems
• Platforms of Opportunity demonstrations
• Augmented Observing Systems demonstration
• Demonstrations on ARGO Platform
• Animal-borne Instruments

Moreover, NAUTILOS is committed to fostering collaborations aligned with the European Strategy for Plastics. It seeks to engage with both current and past research and innovation projects, as well as initiatives and networks, in order to leverage collective expertise. Additionally, the project aims to establish partnerships with key stakeholders such as industry representatives, policymakers, economic institutes, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Through these collaborations, NAUTILOS endeavors to elevate citizen science awareness and enhance the capacity of the blue economy sector.

The fundamental aim of the project will be to complement and expand current European observation tools and services, to obtain a collection of data at a much higher spatial resolution and temporal regularity and length than currently available at the European scale, and to further enable and democratise the monitoring of the marine environment to both traditional and non-traditional data users. The principles that underlie the NAUTILOS project will be those of the development, integration, validation and demonstration of new cutting-edge technologies with regards to sensors, interoperability and embedding skills. The development will always be guided by the objectives of scalability, modularity, cost-effectiveness and open-source availability of software and data products produced. NAUTILOS will also provide full and open data feed towards well-established portals and data integrators (EMODnet, CMEMS, JERICO).