As part of the EU Horizon project One Blue, researchers have successfully completed the sixth of nine planned field sampling campaigns that are being conducted along coastal areas from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. The host institution for this round of sampling was Laboratory for Intelligent Autonomous Systems (LARIAT) at the University of Dubrovnik, with expert support from the University’s Department of Applied Ecology (UNIDU) and the Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA).
The field sampling took place from July 21 to 25, 2025, in the southeastern Adriatic Sea, with the operational base located at the Bistrina Mariculture Laboratory of the Department of Applied Ecology. Participants from UNIDU included head of LARIAT Ivana Palunko, PhD candidate Iva Pozniak, and researchers Ana Bratoš Cetinić and Marina Brailo Šćepanović from the Department of Applied Ecology, working alongside consortium partners.
Over the five-day campaign, the research team collected more than 250 samples from the Mali Ston Bay, the Neretva Channel, Pelješac, and Mljet. The samples will undergo further chemical analyses, toxicity testing, and microbial diversity assessments, enabling precise mapping of contaminants and their potential ecological impacts. The resulting data will also contribute to evaluating environmental risks, helping to identify threats to marine ecosystems in the Adriatic Sea.
Marine ecosystems are facing unprecedented threats from climate change and contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). The One Blue project aims to deepen the understanding of these threats through coordinated research efforts across the Atlantic, Arctic, and Mediterranean Seas. The project explores the interactions between CECs and climate change under controlled experimental conditions and develops innovative tools for ecotoxicity assessment, micro/nanoplastics monitoring systems, autonomous sensors, and decision-support systems. All collected data will be stored in the CECsMarineDB database to enable further analysis and research. One Blue contributes to advancing scientific knowledge in alignment with EU environmental policies.
The Laboratory for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the University of Dubrovnik, in collaboration with the Department of Applied Ecology, is a project partner actively engaged in developing systems for environmental and climate data collection, as well as in field sampling, with a particular focus on microbial and ecological impact assessment of pollutants.
Through this initiative, One Blue project aims to provide actionable scientific data to support a better understanding of ecological changes in the world’s seas and oceans and to foster the development of sustainable solutions for future generations.
For more information, visit: https://one-blue.eu/
