Spectrophotometrics, Water Pollution & Citizen-Scientists

Imagine that seven or eight times a day, different volunteer citizen-scientists around Rochester, MI sampled the waters of Paint Creek, a tributary of the Clinton River, for contaminants.

Or 15 times a day in the Minnow Pond Drain at Farmington Hills, leading to River Rouge.

Or twice a day at the Huron Swamp in White Lake Township, headwaters of the Huron River.

Suppose they used spectrophotometrics available through their smartphones to instantly transmit their findings to a repository set up to collect and collate such data throughout the region.  

Paint Creek

  

This may be feasible by means of citizen-scientists equipped with smartphones adapted as spectrophotometers, a process created by Dr. Andrew Torelli and his colleagues at Bowling Green State University. Torelli explains (excerpts):

We have been developing simple tools to facilitate education and participation in environmental stewardship initiatives by students and members of the broader public.

Throughout the world, there is growing interest for engaging students and members of the public to participate in environmental water quality testing, however there are challenges in providing non-experts with the means to collect, share and interpret reliable scientific data.

...[W]e have developed software and device technologies that allow users to perform spectrophotometric measurements with color-based water quality test kits using their smartphones 7.

Geo-tagged data collected in the field can be easily shared …

You can read more about this on the website for our project we call GeoGraph.

http://personal.bgsu.edu/~torelli/research.html