Coastal marine monitoring experiments at the National Research Council in Messina (Italy): 30 years of research

Coastal marine monitoring is a specialized field of research requiring the acquisition of long-term datasets of the main physico-chemical and biological variables that characterize the aquatic environments as a key strategy to depict the environmental status and its possible changes due to natural or anthropogenic forcings. During the last decades, the devices used in this research field had a great evolution. This progress has been made possible by the advancement of the technologies and of data processing, that have resulted in the availability of new systems for autonomous monitoring. This paper reviews the state of the art of coastal marine monitoring systems developed since 1988 at the Istituto Sperimentale Talassografico - Experimental Thalassographic Institute of Messina (CNR IST), a part of the Italian National Research Council and continued when the Institute was incorporated into the Istituto per l'Ambiente Marino Costiero - Institute for Marine Coastal Environment (IAMC). The research activity focused on coastal marine monitoring started at the end of 1988 and lasted about 30 years, up to the re-organization of the CNR Institutes. This event led to a redistribution of former marine research centers into new Institutes, with missions different from those characterizing the previous structures. Monitoring experiments were performed and new automatic devices were developed and tested. Some of these systems including water samplers and integrated data acquisition and transmission systems are reported.