Autonomous marine sensing

Hi everyone! I’m working on an autonomous marine IoT buoy as a personal engineering project and looking for input from people who actually study the ocean.

Platform:

- Low-power MCU, solar + battery, LTE-M telemetry, SD logging

- Targeted at coastal/estuarine deployments

- Budget-constrained — accessible, low-cost sensors only

Currently instrumented:

- Water temperature (DS18B20)

- Turbidity (optical backscatter)

- LDR

From a research perspective what parameters are most underrepresented in existing low-cost monitoring networks? What would you actually find useful in a dataset from a fixed coastal/estuarine station?

I'm weighing up dissolved oxygen, conductivity/salinity, pH, PAR, depth/pressure, and wave motion via IMU — but I'd rather prioritise based on real research gaps than just instrument everything.