Our story

NAUTA ricerca e consulenza scientifica

(aka NAUTA scientific) s.r.l. (limited liability private company)

founded in 2000 is based in Milano, Italy.

Founders were research associates at the CIBRA – Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali at the Pavia University – Italy.
Our interest on underwater bio-acoustics started long before that, in 1994, when the CIBRA received a grant to study new acoustic censusing methodologies for Marine Mammals in the Mediterranean Sea. Nauta co-founders were hired to take part to those cruises and were involved in CIBRA researches since then.
In the last 18 years we have been working with and for the University of Pavia (CIBRA lab), NURC – NATO Undersea Research Center, ONR – Office of Naval Research – USA and in many smaller contracts.
We took part to oceanographic cruises on several big ships (R/V Alliance – NATO, R/V Endeavor – Rhode Island University, N/I Galatea & N/I Magnaghi – Italian Navy, R/V Leonardo – NATO) and many on small vessels, dealing with underwater bioacoustics and acoustic censusing and localization of Marine Mammals.

Developing practical aspects of this topic we have also been working on the passive acoustic mitigation procedures needed to keep as low as possible the impact, on living organisms, of man-made noise at sea.
NAUTA has run, as sub-contractor, a project on Lampedusa, a small island south of Sicily, funded by the European Commission as a LIFE project. For this project we designed new instruments (RASP – our first bottom recorder) to acoustically estimate Cetacean presence and activity, and their interaction with the fishing industry. This recorder was later adopted in other projects.

In recent years, related to the development of off-shore wind-farming and to the regulatory framework in underwater noise, our activity has deeply increased its involvement into at-sea assessments and measurements. 

We do import and distribute in Europe several brands of underwater acoustic sensors.
We are solution-providers for underwater bio-acoustic monitoring needs.

Our customers, among the others: Greenpeace UK (a pair of two-element towed arrays of hydrophones for their ship Esperanza), Fundacio CRAM Spain (three element towed array of hydrophones), SonSub UK (acoustic sensors for their deep ROV), STARESO France (underwater acoustic sensors), Galatee Film France (underwater acoustic sensors used to locate whales in their movie Oceans), Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (underwater acoustic sensors), Humboldt University Berlin Germany (customized underwater acoustic sensors), IFM GeoMar Germany (customized underwater acoustic sensors), different departments of the french CNRS (customized underwater acoustic sensors), NOAA National Ocean Service CCEHBR – USA (RASPs – underwater acoustic recorders).
Many scientific papers we published.
Collateral to this activity, which still is the core business of our Company, and trusting our experience in system prototyping, in 2004 we picked to opportunity to start a second branch of interests, dealing with media production and development of interactive exhibits for museums.