California Trout, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on healthy waters and wild fish in California, has a great write up on a BlueBoat based monitoring project for coastal lagoons and estuaries. The project is aimed at improving how restoration teams collect water quality data, underwater video, and eventually environmental DNA samples in habitats that are important for species like Southern California steelhead.
The system integrates BlueBoat with water chemistry sensors, an underwater camera, GPS linked mission data, Cockpit, BlueOS, and Node RED. They are measuring temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and conductivity, then pairing those readings with underwater video and location data to better understand how site conditions relate to aquatic species presence and habitat use.
I thought this was a really nice example of BlueBoat being used as a practical field platform in shallow, complex coastal environments. Instead of relying only on labor intensive survey methods, teams can run repeatable missions to build a stronger picture of how restoration sites are changing over time.