Sindbad: A new operational service for a safer leisure and boating navigation

The SINDBAD- Leisure and Boating Safety Navigation - project goal is the development of an advanced operational service to support navigation in a specific area. The first prototype covers the Ligurian Sea (a very busy touristic area in the North Mediterranean Sea) It develops an ICT Service Infrastructure to provide innovative intelligent automation functions and to develop customized services, accessible by your mobile device, for conducting a boat and avoiding any kind of risk ensuring the best degree of comfort

Intercalibration of counting methods for Ostreopsis spp. blooms in the Mediterranean Sea

The 18th International Conference on Harmful Algae (ICHA), From ecosystems to socio-ecosystems, 21-26 October 2018, Nantes, France.-- Ciguatera and related benthic HAB organisms and toxins.-- 1 pageThis study describes the adoption and validation of two innovative methods for the automated count of Ostreopsis spp. concentration in sea water: a molecular assay based on qPCR and an opto-electronic device allowing to automatically acquire images from the whole sample and recognize the target algae on the basis of a machine learning algorithm. The two approaches were tested on samples coming from different locations in 5 countries along the Mediterranean Sea, collected in the framework of the cross-border EU ENPI CBCMED Project M3-HABs, and compared with the standard visual counting method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of both automatic approaches which provide a valuable tool, mostly cost and time effective, for the establishment of large-scale and effective monitoring of Ostreopsis spp. blooms. Moreover, the two automatic methods demonstrated the ability to discriminate for the presence of a different but similar species, O. fattorussoi, for which new species-specific qPCR primers were developedPeer Reviewe