Dr. Raffaella Casotti is a Scientist at the Stazione Zoologica A. Dohrn of Naples, Italy. She is a marine microbial ecologist, and her main tool of research is flow cytometry. She also experiments innovative applications of this technique for the real-time monitoring of phytoplankton and bacteria on board research vessels and on floating buoys.

The ocean environment is vast, remote, and harsh, and observation platforms are increasing and need scientific inputs to implement the biological and ecological variables that they should measure and to better plan and manage the data produced. There is also an urgent need to adopt common standards for data collection and dissemination to maximize the utility of data and their transfer to stakeholders. Costs involved in these platforms are high, and many attempts are in course today to use automated methods remotely controlled and interrogated, to use marine organisms as probe carriers and also to use dismissed oil platforms for monitoring.
This session aims at gathering specialists working in the development, calibration and validation of sensors of biological properties to be measured at sea, and their data generation, sharing and dissemination. These include plankton cell distribution (phytoplankton and zooplankton), real-time bacterial counts, respiration, metabolic rates, noise, fish, marine turtles, birds, mammal abundance and distribution, seagrass cover, among others. Organisms used to carry traditional sensors for monitoring purposes will also be considered, so as applications for the further use of decommissioned oil platforms in the Mediterranean Sea for increasing biological resources and as monitoring stations.
Several themes are concerned, for instance Climate, Real-Time Services, and Ocean Health.