The CLAM project aims at developing a collaborative embedded monitoring and control platform for submarine surveillance by combining cutting edge acoustic vector sensor technology, underwater wireless sensor network protocols, collaborative situation-aware reasoning and distributed signal processing techniques for horizontal and vertical linear sensor arrays. The result will be a cooperative, flexible and robust underwater sensing, reasoning and communication platform for online surveillance of submarine environments accommodating pervasively deployed heterogeneous sensor nodes deployed at different water depths, enabling sensing and actuating devices to exchange data, autonomously network together, and collaboratively and locally asses their observation environment and act upon. Horizontal and vertical collaboration between sensor arrays in form of collaborative routing and beam forming, sensor fusion and distributed processing and reasoning enables fine-grained monitoring of the submarine environment and collaborative event detection as well as transmission of the network information to the monitoring stations.CLAM's consortium has experience and knowledge needed to deliver, exploit, and commercialize a complete solution right from the sensor node platform design, collaborative communication and networking protocols, adaptive, robust and scalable collaborative data processing and reasoning, up to the application requirements and market analysis. Participation of the international, external advisory board in this project indicates that the demand and potential market for such monitoring platforms goes beyond Europe. This can offer Europe a great opportunity in becoming an international leader in this emerging area which is still very much in its infancy.