Protecting the bay: weaving the strands to protect Galway Bay
Smeaton, Alan F.ORCID: 0000-0003-1028-8389
(2010)
Protecting the bay: weaving the strands to protect Galway Bay.
In: WCIT 2010 - 17th World Congress on Information Technology, 25-27 May 2010, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Ireland's greatest natural resource, apart from its people, is its ocean territory, comprising 220,000,000 acres and representing ten times our landmass. Our oceans are rich in natural resources and hold huge potential for energy generation. Yet our oceans face threats, some of which can be monitored, and perhaps addressed, using ICT. In this presentation I give an overview of one small part of our ocean, Galway Bay, and I introduce the SmartBay project, a pilot which brings together industry (both large and small companies, indigenous and multi-national) researchers, and government agencies into a platform project for developing ocean technologies. I describe the work on one kind of sensor developed within our research centre CLARITY, and describe how it can be used to monitor phosphate emissions from lakes and rivers as they ingress into Galway Bay and how this in turn can lead to the development of harmful algal blooms within the bay area.