Poster by: Greg Timms, Ben Howell, John Andrewwartha, Paul McCarthy, John McColloch and Paulo de Souza,  CSIRO

Coastal and estuarine ecosystems are coming under increasing pressure from a large number of uses (e.g. shipping, aquaculture, commercial and recreational boating and fishing, urban development, industry and agriculture in catchments). The Derwent and Huon Estuaries in southern Tasmania, Australia, along with the D’Entrecasteaux Channel which joins them, form one such system.

The Tasmanian ICT Centre is in the process of installing and evaluating a heterogeneous sensor network in the Derwent-Huon region. This network, known as the Tasmanian Marine Analysis Network (TasMAN), provides realtime marine data which is being integrated with models to provide decision makers with a useful diagnostic and prognostic tool which will assist in managing the multiple uses of the estuaries. Subsets of the data are also of interest to commercial and recreational users of the waterway.

The network consists of both surface and underwater nodes and utilises a combination of inductive, acoustic and radio telemetry to retrieve data. Data management within the network is challenging because of the differing data requirements at each node location (heterogeneous data), and because of the presence of an autonomous underwater vehicle, Starbug, which will act as a mobile node.

In this paper we will outline some of the challenges and opportunities for real-time communication of data in coastal and estuarine environments. We will also outline our approach to data storage and management. A key component of this work is the integration of our sparse data set with hydrodynamic models of the region to produce forecasts of estuary conditions and to improve our understanding of the Derwent and Huon Estuaries. Visualisation of heterogeneous datasets for a diverse range of end users is difficult. We will present our initial
application and discuss some of the possibilities for future work in this area.