AMBROSIA: Autonomous Monitoring of Biodiversity with Remote Ocean Sensing and Integrated Analytics

A fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles and static sensors will listen, photograph, and genetically sample the ocean to track marine life in real time. Current marine monitoring relies on ships and manual sampling, which is expensive, infrequent, and often intrusive. This leaves large gaps in data about how fish populations, coral reefs, and other marine ecosystems are changing under pressure from climate change, pollution, and fishing. AMBROSIA aims to fill that gap by creating a system that runs continuously without human intervention, using hydrophones, cameras, environmental sensors, and eDNA samplers all feeding into a central platform. If the project succeeds, regulators and conservation managers could get near-instant updates on biodiversity health across wide ocean areas, at a fraction of current costs. This would directly support sustainable fisheries management, marine protected area enforcement, and compliance with environmental regulations. The technology could also quietly underpin industries that depend on healthy seas—from shipping route planning to offshore wind farm siting—by providing the baseline ecological data those sectors currently lack.