Satellite assets integration for marine protected areas

The SYMPA service aims at providing tourists with advanced location-based services that transform a park visit in a pleasure experience, with the potential advantage of boosting the local and often rural economy, and enabling at the same time the monitoring and control of vessels inside the Marine Protected Area (MPA) to the benefit of marine resources conservation. The preservation of sea biological resources is completed in Sympa by the provision of a daily service of “water quality” parameters. This is possible thanks to the innovative usage of Remote Sensing data integrated in a biogeochemical and hydrodynamic model capable of forecasting the capability of regeneration of the sea and to provide essential water quality indicators. It mainly targets users within coastal zones such as MPAs management organizations and authorities. As vessel localization is fundamental for the monitoring and control of MPA, the service makes use of AIS and GNSS positions provided by the location-based services to tourists, charter companies, and fisheries. Sympa also offers an innovative service to assess the quality of sea water. This is performed by integrating high resolution satellite images coming from Copernicus with ad hoc biogeochemical models. This service is capable to detect and forecast dangerous conditions for the ecosystems. Sentinel SAR images are used for the Vessel detection system, which discovers and identify defined targets in the sea.