Abstract. As more concern is attached to water environmental protection, the need for continuous water quality monitoring is highlighted. This paper proposes a real-time online water environment monitoring terminal which contains the acquisition, storage, processing and transmission of water environment parameters and control instruction. The sensing part of the terminal includes the novel planar electrode sensor, commercial available sensors, GPS and IP camera. The data acquisition board provides compatible interfaces and stores water quality information. Mesh network is used for transmission. The performance shows the terminal can be effectively applied to distributed water environment automatic monitoring.