The lack of affordable, self-sustaining platforms for monitoring marine water quality means that measurements are done primarily through grab sampling at a limited number of locations and time, followed by analysis back at a centralised facility. This has resulted in huge gaps in our knowledge of water quality. This project aims to develop platforms capable of remote sampling and analysis over extended periods of time. This would provide the building blocks for establishing an 'environmental nervous system' comprised of many distributed sensing devices that share their data in near real-time on the web. The envisaged 'environmental nervous system’ allows marine environment to be closely monitored, enabling the early detection of pollution events to minimise the danger to people and contamination of distribution systems.