On Friday 1st October, we were pleased to welcome Dr Scott Ensign and Shannon Hicks of The Stroud Water Research Center. to present their webinar entitled ‘The Three Ingredients for Scaling-Up Water Sensor Networks: People, Platform, and Protocols’. The talk continued our ‘Sensing the Environment’ webinar series. Scott Ensign is Vice President and Research Scientist at Stroud Water Research Center, a U.S.-based non-profit that seeks to advance knowledge and stewardship of freshwater systems through global research, education, and watershed restoration. Shannon Hicks is the Stroud Center’s Research Engineer who leads hardware design and water sensor network deployment for multi-stakeholder groups across the U.S. In an effort to democratize and expand environmental data collection in pursuit of scientific, educational, and water management outcomes, the Stroud Center has combined three essential ingredients. The Stroud Center’s EnviroDIY initiative brings together a global community of people to learn and share how to make environmental sensing equipment through on-line and in-person training. Tightly integrated with EnviroDIY is Monitor My Watershed, an online data sharing platform for visualizing environmental data posted by internet-connected devices. This platform implements protocols with standardized data formats that allow machine- to-machine data exchange with other environmental data hubs. The speakers will present the challenges and their solutions for scaling this environmental sensor network across the globe.
The webinar touches on a number of useful resources. EnviroDIY is an initiative of Stroud Water Research Center that provides a community for do-it-yourself environmental science and monitoring (envirodiy.org). EnviroDIY is part of WikiWatershed, a web toolkit designed to help citizens, conservation practitioners, municipal decision makers, researchers, educators, and students advance knowledge and stewardship of fresh water (wikiwatershed.org). WikiWatershed also includes Monitor My Watershed, a data portal that allows you to share and explore do-it-yourself environmental monitoring data (monitormywatershed.org).
Further information and details, this and the wider webinar series is online at https://digitalenvironment.org/cde-webinar-series/#EnsignHicks.