TRIDENT aims to develop a reliable, transparent and cost-effective system for continuous environmental impact assessment and monitoring of exploration and exploitation activities in the deep sea. All potential environmental impacts and mitigation approaches must be fully understood beforehand. The effective monitoring and inspection system to be developed will comply with international and national legal frameworks. TRIDENT will complement all relevant physical, chemical, geological and biological parameters already known to be measured at the sea surface, mid-water and seabed. The project will also identify gaps in methods of real-time data gathering, build data sets, and develop technological solutions to address them. These are essential steps to develop statistically robust environmental baselines, establish reliable indicators of good environmental status and define thresholds for significant impact, enabling the standardisation of tools and methods. The project consortium will subsequently develop and test an integrated system of static/relocatable and mobile observatory platforms equipped with the latest automatic sensors and samplers to measure environmental parameters. This team of relocatable and mobile observatories with autonomous operations, combined with adaptive observation strategies, will be critical for a cost-effective monitoring solution with optimal spatiotemporal coverage of the monitoring areas. To support quick actions for preventing serious harm to the environment, the system will implement high-capacity data handling pipelines able to collect, transmit, process and display monitoring data in near real-time, INSPIRE compliant. and made available through the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet). Finally, TRIDENT will provide technological and systemic solutions for forecasting potential environmental impacts by using the developed monitoring and mitigation methods.
