Assessment of risk caused by buried waste in the Baltic Sea

The SITAR project (Seafloor Imaging and Toxicity: Assessment of Risks caused by buried waste), sponsored by the European Union under the 5 th Framework Programme, aims to investigate and to develop innovative solutions to the technological and scientific problems that up to now have prevented the assessment of the environmental risk connected with toxic dumpsites on the seafloor, where a significant part of the toxic waste is buried within the bottom sediments. After a short description of the main line of investigations of the project, the decision support system (DSS) which is able to integrate the different data and the different aspects of the project is described with specific attention to the aspects of integration and accessibility of acoustical imaging data and biotoxicological information to end-users and decision makers.