Development and Testing of a Monitoring Platform for Underwater Archaeological Sites

Aquatic ecosystems are inherently dynamic and challenging to monitor, facing escalating anthropogenic threats such as climate change and widespread pollution. Consequently, continuous and reliable environmental monitoring is critical to preserve biodiversity, maintain the health of delicate ecosystems, monitor and regulate pollutant concentrations, and ensure the sustainability of resource exploitation (e.g., fishing). Furthermore, specialized monitoring is required for submerged cultural heritage sites (e.g., archaeological findings). While these sites share general environmental concerns, they also necessitate dedicated surveillance against physical damage, degradation, and unauthorized access or theft. Despite this critical need, a significant portion of aquatic environmental monitoring remains laborintensive, relying on infrequent and localized sampling by human operators. This approach is inherently time-consuming, spatially sparse, and susceptible to sampling error, rendering it insufficient for the continuous, high-resolution data collection required. The urgent need is therefore for a next-generation monitoring system capable of providing constant, autonomous surveillance of both water and air parameters with sufficient temporal frequency and spatial resolution to deliver comprehensive and actionable insights. In this work we present the effort to design, realize and test a floating platform for the dedicated surveillance of a specific underwater archaeological site. We also present the results obtained from the testing deployment.