Design and Implementation of Electronic Logging Instrument to Help Scientific Diver in Coral Reef Observation

Abstract

Coral Reefs observations need to be conducted to determine general condition of coral reef ecosystems. This observation can be used to plan further management. There a re many kind of coral reef observation method such as Line Intercept Transect (LIT), Point Intercept Transect (PIT), Photo Transect, Belt Transect, Benthic towed - Diver, etc. Indonesia as an archipelago country have many kinds of coral. Indonesia is also lo cated in the area of Coral Triangle Initiative. In Indonesia, LIT and PIT are usually used in Coral Monitoring. There are some disadvantages when collecting data using these methods. Divers usually take hours to input the data. Therefore, authors have an i dea to facilitate the diver to decrease input data time by way of employing look - up table system. The look up table basically will simplify the writing process namely by replacing text with numerical coding. In addition, water quality data such as temperat ure, depth, and visibility are embedded in this electronic logging instrument. This instrument used Arduino Mega2560, keypad 4x3, LCD Module 16x2 character, Real Time Clock, temperature sensor, pressure sensor, visibility sensor and micro SD Card module. A rduino IDE 1.6.5 is used to program the microcontroller. In this paper, we will describe the implementation and field observation result of this instrument.