Welcome to Sitemark’s MONOCLE Project Site (Active)

Funded by EU H2020, MONOCLE brings together 12 partners from Europe to create sustainable in situ observation solutions for Earth Observation (EO) of optical water quality in inland and transitional waters.

The Challenge of Water Quality Monitoring

Water is one of the most precious resources we have. Water ecosystems throughout the world are particularly vulnerable to human activity. They impact overall water quality, energy, and food and primarily economic and sustainability impacts.

Monitoring the quality of inland and water coastal bodies can be possible today with advances in technology in a way that is reliable and efficient at a lower cost. The Multiscale Observation Networks for Optical monitoring of Coastal waters, Lakes and Estuaries project, or MONOCLE for short, addresses the need for reliable water body data by deploying new and improved sensors on autonomous platforms with input from citizen scientists.

These will provide key reference observations to improve Earth Observation (EO) based water quality services. Today these water bodies represent the weakest performance in terms of EO capabilities, and thus the new MONOCLE system will be essential in improving these capabilities.

How Sitemark contributes to this initiative

Sitemark’s contribution to the initiative is setting up operational protocols, sensor integration, and a global operations network. With our experience in data acquisition, we set up drone flight parameters and requirements in terms of equipment. At the same time, our partner, VITO Remote Sensing, takes on the task of data analytics through Sitemark’s aerial data platform.

2 people checking the data that is being captured with a drone