TideRiders: Toward a Citizen-Scientist-Enabled and Institution-Supported
Distributed Sensor Network for Water Quality Monitoring
Abstract
The advocacy activities necessary to sustain healthy watersheds and
improve impaired ones ultimately rely on the democratic process, and
therefore depend on a public that values our coastal resources and
understands the role that water quality plays in maintaining that value.
We contend that an opportunity exists to improve the temporal and
spatial density of monitoring by reducing the cost of collecting
measurements, while simultaneously fostering an informed and invested
public. We envision a distributed water quality monitoring sensor
network, composed of low-cost ($1000-$2000) profiling devices we call
TideRiders, built and operated by private citizens and local educational
organizations and supported by an institution-hosted centralized data
and control portal. The TideRider concept engages the public not just in
the collection of data but also in the building, deployment, operation,
and recovery of these robot sensors. TideRiders will carry a suite of
basic water quality instrumentation (temperature, conductivity, and
dissolved oxygen), transmit data and accept commands over the cellular
network, and can sample surface and bottom waters by surfacing and
submerging on a programmable schedule. Operators will harness tidal
currents to move their TideRiders deliberately around an embayment,
essentially by surfacing in a favorable tide and anchoring on the bottom
in an adverse tide. A network of TideRiders deployed in
tidally-dominated estuaries like Buzzards Bay and Narragansett Bay could
provide basic water quality data at several-hour intervals for weeks at
a time by “virtually mooring” in center-bay locations that are
otherwise only accessible by boat and therefore typically sampled less
frequently than shore stations. We present preliminary field results
from a series of prototypes designed and built by students. The
prototype devices utilize a novel low-cost semi-passive shallow-water
buoyancy engine and were constructed for less than $1000 in parts.