Abstract
Repeat observations underpin our understanding of environmental processes, but financial constraints often limit scientists’ ability to deploy dense networks of conventional commercial instrumentation. Rapid growth in the Internet-Of-Things (IoT) and the maker movement is paving the way for low-cost electronic sensors to transform global environmental monitoring. Accessible and inexpensive sensor construction is also fostering exciting opportunities for citizen science and participatory research. Drawing on 6 years of developmental work with Arduino-based open-source hardware and software, extensive laboratory and field testing, and incorporation of such technology into active research programmes, we outline a series of successes, failures and lessons learned in designing and deploying environmental sensors. Six case studies are presented: a water table depth probe, air and water quality sensors, multi-parameter weather stations, a time-sequencing lake sediment trap, and a sonic anemometer for monitoring sand transport. Schematics, code and purchasing guidance to reproduce our sensors are described in the paper, with detailed build instructions hosted on our King’s College London Geography Environmental Sensors Github repository and the FreeStation project website. We show in each case study that manual design and construction can produce research-grade scientific instrumentation (mean bias error for calibrated sensors –0.04 to 23%) for a fraction of the conventional cost, provided rigorous, sensor-specific calibration and field testing is conducted. In sharing our collective experiences with build-it-yourself environmental monitoring, we intend for this paper to act as a catalyst for physical geographers and the wider environmental science community to begin incorporating low-cost sensor development into their research activities. The capacity to deploy denser sensor networks should ultimately lead to superior environmental monitoring at the local to global scales.
Highlights
1.1 Hurdles to environmental monitoringEnvironmental science is rooted in observation
By providing full design schematics, code and guidance on purchasing the components on our Github repository, we intend this paper to act as a catalyst for geographers and environmental scientists to embed low-cost, build-it-yourself sensors into their research programmes
Deriving insight from six case studies, including the global FreeStation hydrometeorological network, we have demonstrated the potential for low-cost sensors powered by Arduino across a wide range of disciplines including atmospheric science, ecology, geomorphology and hydrology
Summary
The global density of river gauging stations has decreased since the 1980s (Global Runoff Data Centre, 2018; Hannah et al, 2011) and similar rates of closure of hydrometeorological stations, especially in Africa and Latin America (Overeem et al, 2013; World Meteorological Organization [WMO], 2009, cited in van de Giesen et al, 2014), have been shown to hamper ground-truthing efforts (Lorenz and Kunstmann, 2012) This trend is concerning since satellite remote sensing is not without limitations, including the mismatch in spatial and temporal scales between satellite observations and environmental phenomena. Low-cost sensor networks have been shown to improve the spatial coverage of ground-truthing data for validating satellite products (Tebbs et al, 2019) and some large-scale hydrometeorological monitoring networks have been launched, including the FreeStation initiative (www.freestation.org) and the Trans-African HydroMeteorological Observatory (www.tahmo.org; van de Giesen et al, 2014). This paper is timely and will serve to further encourage the expansion of low-cost monitoring into environmental research
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