###### Abstract  
Monitoring of aquatic ecosystems has been historically accomplished by intensive campaigns of direct measurements (by probes and other boat instruments) and indirect extensive methods such as aero-photogrammetry and satellite detection. These measurements characterized the research in the last century, with significant but limited improvements within those technological boundaries. The newest advances in the field of smart devices and increased networking capabilities provided by emerging tools, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), offer increasing opportunities to provide accurate and precise measurements over larger areas. These perspectives also correspond to an increasing need to promptly respond to frequent catastrophic impacts produced by drilling stations and intense transportation activities of dangerous materials over ocean routes. The shape of coastal ecosystems continuously varies due to increasing anthropic activities and climatic changes, aside from touristic activities, industrial impacts, and conservation practices. Smart buoy networks (SBNs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and multi-sensor microsystems (MSMs) such as smart cable water (SCW) are able to learn specific patterns of ecological conditions, along with electronic \"noses\", permitting them to set innovative low-cost monitoring stations reacting in real time to the signals of marine environments by autonomously adapting their monitoring programs and eventually sending alarm messages to prompt human intervention. These opportunities, according to multimodal scenarios, are dramatically changing both the coastal monitoring operations and the investigations over large oceanic areas by yielding huge amounts of information and partially computing them in order to provide intelligent responses. However, the major effects of these tools on the management of marine environments are still to be realized, and they are likely to become evident in the next decade. In this review, we examined from an ecological perspective the most striking innovations applied by various research groups around the world and analyzed their advantages and limits to depict scenarios of monitoring activities made possible for the next decade. IoT; buoy; aquaculture; coastal; connectivity; transmission; real time; network +
Footnote †: journal: Marine Science and Engineering
contemporary ecology and conservation management is the accuracy of tracking of the spatial distribution of human impacts, including oil spills and chemical pollution, along with the evaluation of environmental quality and fishery activities [1]. Automation is an important part of the new generation of information technology, and it represents the ultimate achievement in the development of ocean monitoring programs. Various emerging technologies developed in the last decade include smart devices for the collection of information and their sharing over networks, as well as emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), often foreseen as the future solution to an intelligent monitoring assembly [2]. The systems currently in use generally consist of observatories connected to a network system lying on the seafloor or connected to the surface by, for example, a buoy. In the first case, an example of a stable observatory is the Dense Ocean Floor Network System for Earthquakes and Tsunamis (DONET) by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). DONET is a submarine-cabled real-time seafloor observatory network intended for large-scale research and earthquake and tsunami monitoring. The program, which began in 2006, consists of several phases involving an increase in the number of observatories. This system concept consists of a high-reliability backbone cable, which provides the power line and the communications channel, connecting several nodes with different measurement instruments [3].