Dolphins’ environment assessment is an activity
able to contribute to the reduction of their mortality
especially in regions with a reduced number of individuals
such as on the Sado Estuary area. Optimized field
distributed instrumentation for water quality parameter
measurement and underwater acoustic sound measurement
provides important data that can be used for advanced data
analysis of dolphins’ environment. The purpose of the paper
is to report the work developed in the areas of distributed
instrumentation and geographic information systems for
dolphins’ environment assessment. The architecture of the
overall system is based on primary monitoring nodes with
embedded servers that receive data from multi-parameter
water quality sensing units, from a GPS unit and from a
hydrophone. The received data is wireless transmitted to a
PC based base unit where an advanced processing block and
the geographic information system (GIS) are implemented
assuring on-line environment assessment through dynamic
web pages. GIS’s database capabilities assure that postprocessing
tasks such as dolphin’s sound recognition or
water quality data mapping can be easily implemented.