News From Aquaculture to Broader Water Quality Monitoring

From Aquaculture to Broader Water Quality Monitoring: BiOceanOr’s Work with the City of Cannes

2026/10/02

Climate change and shifting environmental conditions don’t stop at the edge of a fish farm. Marine heatwaves, changing currents, and water quality disruptions affect a much wider range of activities, and BiOceanOr’s environmental intelligence, built and proven in aquaculture, is now being put to work in new contexts.

A Coastline Under Pressure

The Bay of Cannes is a good example of how much activity can happen along the coast:

Marinas and boat traffic

Fishing and aquaculture activity

Bathing areas

Waste water and industrial outfalls

Marine geothermal power plant

Protected habitats like Posidonia meadows and coralligenous habitats

All of these share the same water and put pressure on its quality. Understanding what’s actually happening in the water becomes essential to lay the groundwork for a decision-support tool for integrated and sustainable management of marine environments.

Building a Reference Monitoring Network

To help answer that need, BiOceanOr installed and maintains a connected buoy in the Bay of Cannes, in operation since April 2026. It continuously measures:

Temperature

Dissolved oxygen

Salinity

Turbidity

Chloropyll-a

transmitting environmental data in real time and feeding oxygen predictions, all combined with meteo-oceanic model data.

This kind of network serves several needs at once:

Distinguishing the environmental impact of different zones, discharge points and activities along the coast

Monitoring and anticipating the effects of human activity or meteo-oceanic events, such as marine heatwaves or upwelling

Providing a shared, reliable reference data and analytics network that local stakeholders can coordinate around

From Aquaculture to Coastal Management

This project illustrates a broader move for BiOceanOr. We are taking the environmental intelligence built for fish farmers, combining biology, hydrodynamics and artificial intelligence, and applying it to the challenges faced by coastal cities and public stakeholders. The tools and scientific expertise are the same. What changes is who benefits from them. It’s a natural step in BiOceanOr’s diversification beyond aquaculture.

Perspectives & Next Steps for the City of Cannes

The Bay of Cannes brings together many uses and, thus, many possible monitoring needs. A more dynamic or relative monitoring setup could be a valuable complement. Other data sources could also be brought in to enrich the picture. Looking further ahead, a broader network with extra buoys and data from different stakeholders who need to monitor environmental impact, could be coordinated by SICASIL, CACPL, the City of Cannes, with BiOceanOr implementing and operating it on the ground.