Project Partners

This project is funded by OceanCare, a Swiss non-profit organisation founded in 1989 and committed to marine wildlife protection.

Through research and conservation projects, campaigns, environmental education, and involvement in a range of important international committees, OceanCare undertakes concrete steps to improve the situation for wildlife in the world’s oceans. In 2011, OceanCare was granted Special Consultative Status on marine issues with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

OceanCare is funding this project which is carried out by the following partners:

Project Coordinator

Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute (PCRI) is a scientific non-profit organisation whose goal is the study and conservation of cetaceans.

The main objectives of Pelagos Institute are:

  • to conduct scientific research on cetaceans in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea as a whole

  • to spread information and knowledge towards every concerned individual or public body

  • to promote the public awareness

  • to achieve the conservation of cetaceans and of the integrity of marine ecosystems

The scientific achievements and the discoveries accomplished by PCRI have travelled across the world through world-wide renowned communication media, such as CNN, BBC, TIME, Times, Guardian, Economist, National Geographic (US edition) and many others

PCRI is the Coordinator of this project.

System design, development, deployment and handling

FORTH conducts specialized scientific research in strategic high-added value sectors, focusing on interdisciplinary research and development (R&D) activities in areas of major scientific, societal and economic interest, such as: Lasers and Photonics, Microelectronics, Advanced Materials/Nanotechnology, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Biotechnology, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Precision Medicine, Systems Biology, Robotics, Telecommunications, Applied and Computational Mathematics, Chemical Engineering Sciences, Energy, Environment, Human and Social Sciences, Astrophysics and Astronomy.

IACM/FORTH is one of the few research institutes in Europe dedicated to promoting the use of advanced mathematics in natural sciences and engineering. In particular the Wave Propagation Group at IACM/FORTH focuses in the area of underwater acoustics with applications in oceanography and geophysics. Activity areas include forward propagation modelling, inverse problems such as ocean acoustic tomography, source localization, sea-bed reconstruction and inverse scattering, analysis of sonar performance, marine bioacoustics, statistical signal characterization and noise modelling.

In this project IACM/FORTH is responsible for the design, development deployment and handling of the complete system. This includes the acoustic stations (moorings and local software for preprocessing and detection) as well as the land-based station (transmitted data processing, localization, and streaming to MarineTraffic).

Project Team: Emmanuel Skarsoulis (principal investigator) , George Piperakis, Emmanuel Orfanakis, Panos Papadakis, Michael Kalogerakis (also Hellenic Mediterranean University), Despoina Pavlidi.

Real time display of localization results

MarineTraffic is an open, community-based project, which provides real-time information on the movements of ships and the current location of ships in harbours and ports. A database of information on the vessels includes for example details of the location where they were built plus dimensions of the vessels, gross tonnage and International Maritime Organisation (IMO) number. Vessel locations are shown on a Google Maps background using the Google Maps API,[Nautical Charts and OpenStreetMap.

In this project MarineTraffic receives in real time the detection / localization results produced by the system and plots them on its main application map, to alert nearby vessels.

Public dissemination - Consulting

Green 2 Sustain was established in 2014 as a Private Capital Company and is active mainly in the field of environmental services, as well as in innovative support for technical and business activities, emphasizing on sustainability and development.

It covers a wide range of environmental, economic, sustainability and social fields, harmonically cooperating to provide the best available services and products to its collaborators and customers.

In this project Green 2 Sustain is a consulting partner and also responsible for the dissemination of the project activities to the general public.


Consulting

CINTAL - Centro de Investigação Tecnológica do Algarve, is a non profit private association, created in 1990, with the following main objectives:R&D in the areas of science and technology higher education and formation services and contracting in relation with the industry Cintal associates are the Universidade do Algarve, a public University, Rolear a local company acting in the area of automatic control and energy and INETI, a government research laboratory located in Lisbon

CINTAL is a consulting partner in this project.