Environmental Sensing & Monitoring
IMG_7513.MOVAutonomous chambers for distributed environmental observing
Measuring carbon fluxes generally involves a trade-off between targeting temporal resolution and spatial resolution, and equipment costs limit where these measurements are made and by whom. Low-cost, autonomous sensing tools can increase the accessibility and coverage of these measurements and enable advances in ecological and carbon inventory research. In work led by Elizabeth Forbes, with the Bren School at UCSB and the Yale Department of Mechanical Engineering we are developing a system of "Fluxbots" for distributed, continuous, and autonomous sensing of gas exchange.
A paper describing the engineering and sensor performance of the device is available here: Fluxbot: The Next Generation - Design and Validation of a Wireless, Open-Source Mechatronic CO2 Flux Sensing Chamber.
Additional manuscripts describing the potential and applications of Fluxbots in arrays for landscape-scale environmental monitoring are forthcoming.
Characterizing and facilitating use of low-cost greenhouse gas sensors
The autonomous, automated chambers described above are based on the integration of a commercially-available low-cost CO2 sensor. We characterized the performance of the sensor (relative to other sensor platforms) and its utility for measuring atmospheric gas concentrations, as well as machine-learning based approaches for calibration and correction, in a series of controlled and outdoor experiments. Results are available here: Low-Cost CO2 NDIR Sensors: Performance Evaluation and Calibration Using Machine Learning Techniques
