Proactive marine information system for environmental monitoring

Detecting and monitoring oil spills at sea has become an important issue due to both the increased demand and use of oil based products, and the more careful attention given to environmental protection. Safety in maritime transportation has improved, but contextually the number of vessels along shipping routes has increased, thus raising the risk of accidents occurring. Along with this, also monitoring sources and capabilities have individually grown; what still needs to be improved is an integrated approach to monitoring, in particular in case of sensitive areas, such as protected marine parks. The Marine Information System proposed here is an integrated and interoperable system able to monitor maritime traffic, using sensing capabilities from various electronic sources, along with geo-positioning tools, and based on a specific communication infrastructure. This system, integrating seamlessly heterogeneous data, supplies a collection of decision support services providing proactive functionalities, which demonstrates its potential in facilitating dynamic links among different data, models and actors. Accomplishment of several field tests demonstrates these potentialities.