The importance of the coastal zone for economic activities, and the anthropogenic stresses on the ecosystem, have been described and discussed widely throughout the past 20 years.

The objective of the BELCOLOUR-2 project was to further improve the quality of existing optical remote sensing products for marine, coastal and inland waters and to develop innovative products including primary production and partial pressure of CO2 for key applications such as aquaculture and air-sea CO2 fluxes. This project has now ended.

The BRADEX (Bottom Reflectance and Adjacency Experiment) project aims to improve the scientific basis for processing of optical remote sensing imagery in shallow coastal and inland waters, where bottom reflectance and/or adjacency effects (“environmental straylight”) may be significant.