Integrating Ocean Technology and Ecology: Advanced Monitoring of Danish Waters for Sustainable Blue Economy and Environmental Protection

Advanced autonomous observations in Danish coastal waters are a major element for balancing the needs of blue economy and to understanding climate and human impacts on marine ecosystems. This presentation highlights the use of diverse autonomous and automated platforms to effectively improve ocean observations, generating partially or fully automated maps resolving biogeochemical and ecological processes in Denmark including examples in the fjord systems, the Øresund, North Atlantic, Greenland, Baltic Sea and beyond. For comprehensive monitoring of these waters a diverse range of autonomous and automated platforms are considered including ARGO floats, WaveGlider USV, Otter USV, BlueROV2, towed image acquisition systems, multi-camera 3D systems, and LiDAR/multi-beam3D mapping. The application of these technologies has led to breakthroughs in environmental monitoring, such as 3D reconstructions of mussel reefs and farms, 2D mappings of eelgrass meadows and mussel reefs, long-endurance unmanned acoustic surveys, and detailed infrastructure inspection and monitoring. These advancements provide new best practices for the effective monitoring of the health and dynamics of marine ecosystems, playing a critical role in guiding sustainable practices for the blue economy and critical infrastructure monitoring.