YSI’s ’EcoMapper’ a remote control underwater vehicle for plotting water quality and bathymetry over wide areas, has been made available for hire by UK company YSI Hydrodata.
YSI Regional Manager Ian Thompson says, "This highly advanced monitoring technology comes with a 6-figure price tag, so it will be outside the reach of many water monitoring practitioners. However, we have been
running training courses around the world and there is a tremendous demand for the system because of its unique capabilities, so we are offering the unit for short-term hire, subject to certain terms and conditions."
The ’EcoMapper’ is a unique remote monitoring system which only requires one person to deploy and retrieve, has integrated water quality sensors, intuitive mission planning software, and weighs less than 21Kg. It is ideal for routine mapping of lakes, reservoirs, rivers, estuaries and near-coastal environments.
The EcoMapper dataset is also unique, offering extremely high spatial resolution of the key physicochemical water quality parameters in addition to chlorophyll and blue-green algae fluorometers, a depth sounder and optional side-scan sonar. Typical vehicle speeds are 2-4 knots and mission times can range up to 10 hours, providing detailed maps of water quality and bathymetry.