Mystic River

This is a revision from January 11, 2014 19:43. View all revisions

[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.]

Background

The Mystic River 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.

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.

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

Water Quality Monitor Prototypes

Our main focus at first is on developing open hardware alternatives to the current most common water quality monitoring sensors, which measure temperature, conductivity, and water depth.

Tracking temperature over time at several locations along a river allows researchers to detect unusual trends in river water temperature -- this might help locate pollution sources along the river, and helps assess whether the water temperature is amenable to fish.
Conductivity is a useful measure for a variety of water quality issues, including excess salinity (usuall due to road salt), dissolved solids, and other sources of water pollution.
Measuring water depth along with these other parameters allows researchers to correlate temperature and conductivity with storm events -- helping to determine the relative contribution of stormwater runoff and combined sewer overflow events to changes in river water quality.

We're currently basing our data logger prototype on an amazing open source hardware project: the "mchck" -- an inexpensive, low-power microcontroller design with on-board flash memory, and 'real time clock'. This means that it can function as a low-cost, long-lasting datalogger.

Our fork of the mchck project is here, with datalogger functionality implemented here.

The shield we're developing for the mchck that will include hardware for measuring conductivity, temperature, and water depth is here.