Mapping coastal areas and shallow water depth has become an interesting topic for hydrographers and scientists. Many techniques using traditional methods have been used to map and study seabed evolutions of these areas. However, ships, vessels and aircrafts used for bathymetric surveys in shallow water present some limitations, especially their inability to map hard-to-reach areas and very near shoreline waters. In addition, the cost and human resources deployed to conduct these surveys make them very expensive, even for small projects. In this paper we present a cost-effective tool and a practical method for bathymetric studies of shallow water using multispectral satellite images. We applied the Satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) method on the coast of San Vito Lo Capo with a Geoeye-1 satellite image, using available field data for calibration and vertical referencing. The results show bathymetric information for a depth of 10 m with R2=0.753, contributing to the management of ports, maritime transport and the coastal environment in general.

This paper presents the ecology and policy basis as well as the technology solution for a Martera funded project (ARIM). The project develops platforms for bentho-pelagic monitoring using an arrangement of crawler and stationary platforms. A combination of visual and acoustic sensing along with standard oceanographic sensors supports advanced and continues spatial-temporal monitoring. Just as important is the automatic processing techniques under development that will allow habitat and species (or categories of species) to be automatically recognized and reported during the mission and thus support science and monitoring services without backing from expensive ship time. First version develops autonomy under controlled conditions with a tethered crawler exploring the neighbourhood of a cabled stationary instrumented garage. Our vision is that fuel cell technology will enable us to use the system for selfsustained long-term autonomous operations for science as well as for industry purposes.

Here we present the concept of NEREA, the Naples Ecological REsearch for Augmented observatories, an integrated observatory with a modular, adaptive structure, characterised by two main modules, NEREA-mob and NEREA-fix. NEREA-mob is conceived as monthly sampling at a coastal station in the Gulf of Naples where the whole water column is sampled for end-to-end (from microbes to fish) biological parameters coupling traditional with omic approaches (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metabolomics). NEREA-fix will be deployed in 2020 in the Dohrn canyon at ca. 600 m, and will integrate a seabed platform and a mooring line equipped with a set of different chemicalphysical and bio-ecological sensors. Ecological information from the two modules will be integrated by ad-hoc additional samplings in key moments and experimental activities aimed at contextualizing the sites at a larger scale. NEREA therefore aims at representing a first step towards the establishment of a network of augmented observatories, end-to-end approaches under the multidisciplinary framework required for ocean health assessment.

Software Defined Receivers(SDR) can be a very useful tools both for researchers and surveyors since it is capable of extreme customization allowing user to access, visualize and modify signal processing blocks. In this paper we test the single point performance of the GNSS-SDR software receiver coupled with Nuand BladeRF x40 front-end feeded by an active u-blox GNSS antenna powered by a bias-tee needful to provide external gain. Four different tests have been carried out in two different scenarios located in Naples (Italy) employing two different antennas: the first dataset was acquired in a site expected to be a low-multipath environment while the second in a strong multipath scenario in Centro Direzionale (CDN) site using the same instrumentation. Both tests were carried out with two different antennas. Results achieved show how SDR is a good candidate to represent an innovative low-cost and flexible platform which can be used to get intermediate frequency data useful in the field of GNSS reflectometry and ionospheric scintillation analysis.

Marine geodesy, offshore surveys and physical oceanography are usually related to the highly precise kinematic positioning of surveying platforms such as vessels, buoys and aircrafts. Currently, the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) can provide a kinematic positioning accuracy of decimeter to centimeter level in relative mode, being potentially an appropriate choice for determining marine platform positions. However, these positioning techniques are related to the presence of reference stations and are not applicable in remote areas. In this work, two approaches are considered to determine the altitude variations of GPS antenna, which is an important parameter for the analysis of a ship motion. In detail, time-differencing of carrier phase measurements and precise point positioning approaches are applied on static data, collected by a single-frequency receiver, in order to assess the vertical variations performance.