[Main image above is by Suzanne McDaniel, and was taken at Island End River in Chelsea, MA, part of the Mystic River watershed.  Suzanne's photo was one of the winners of the [MyRWA photo contest](http://mysticriver.org/photo-contest/).]

### Background 

The [Mystic River](http://mysticriver.org) in Massachusetts flows from the Mystic Lakes in Winchester and Arlington, through Medford, Somerville, Everett, Charlestown and Chelsea, and into Boston Harbor, and has supported a long history of economic progress in one of the most densely populated urban areas of New England. Today, the Mystic faces serious water quality problems, shared by urban water bodies around the world: pollution from leaky sewer pipes, waste disposal sites; excessive nutrients and discharges of raw sewage; fuel hydrocarbons; and road salt. Portions of the watershed often fail to meet state bacteria standards for swimming and boating, and its Alewife Brook subwatershed is one of the most contaminated water bodies in Boston. The Mystic River watershed received a ‘D’ from the US EPA on its [2012 water quality report card](http://www.epa.gov/mysticriver/reportcards.html).

Several organizations are engaged in water monitoring projects for the Mystic, but the high cost and ‘closed data’ nature of current technology severely limits the scope of current efforts, and makes data sharing difficult. 

The Public Lab community, by designing a low-cost, ‘open source’ water quality monitor that is easy to build and maintain, hopes to greatly expand the scope of current monitoring efforts, and to **enable communities to develop their own grassroots monitoring networks. 
**

This page is a description of Public Lab's efforts to develop low-cost open hardware tools for assessing water quality in the [Mystic River watershed](http://mysticriver.org). 

### IOBY Campaign

Public Lab is partnering with IOBY to develop a low-cost water quality monitoring network for the Mystic River.  Here's the crowd-funding campaign, which ends February 14th:

[Mystic River Open Water IOBY Campaign](https://ioby.org/project/mystic-river-open-water)

### Water Quality Monitor Prototypes

We're currently basing our data logger prototype on the amazing open source hardware project the "[mchck](https://mchck.org/)" -- a very inexpensive, low-power microcontroller design with on-board flash memory, a RTC. 

Our fork of the mchck project is [here](https://github.com/bgamari/mchck), with datalogger functionality implemented [here](https://github.com/bgamari/data-logger).

The shield we're developing for the mchck that will include hardware for measuring conductivity, temperature, and water depth is [here](https://github.com/bgamari/water-quality). 

[![pic1.png](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/522/medium/pic1.png)](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/522/original/pic1.png)


[![pic2.png](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/525/medium/pic2.png)](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/525/original/pic2.png)

[![pic3.png](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/524/medium/pic3.png)](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/524/original/pic3.png)

[![pic4.png](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/523/medium/pic4.png)](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/523/original/pic4.png)

[![pic5.png](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/521/medium/pic5.png)](https://i.publiclab.org/system/images/photos/000/002/521/original/pic5.png)


### References

- "Effects of road salt and Phragmites australis invasion on the vegetation of a Western Massachusetts calcareous lake-basin fen" -- [paper](http://bit.ly/K9hK81)