NAUTILOS will fill in existing marine observation and modelling gaps through the development of a new generation of costeffective sensors and samplers for physical (salinity, temperature), chemical (inorganic carbon, nutrients, oxygen), andbiological (phytoplankton, zooplankton, marine mammals) essential ocean variables, in addition to micro-/nano-plastics, toimprove our understanding of environmental change and anthropogenic impacts related to aquaculture, fisheries, andmarine litter.Newly developed marine technologies will be integrated with different observing platforms and deployedthrough the use of novel approaches in a broad range of key environmental settings (e.g. from shore to deep-seadeployments) and EU policy-relevant applications:
- Fisheries & Aquaculture Observing Systems,
- Platforms of Opportunity demonstrations,
- Augmented Observing Systems demonstration,
- Demonstrations on ARGO Platform
- Animal-borne Instruments.
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 wellestablished portals and data integrators (EMODnet, CMEMS, JERICO).