[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 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. Our initial goal is to develop open source, low-cost dataloggers that measure these various parameters over time, storing data on board the datalogger, with batteries that last for several months. Volunteers will then build and deploy these sensors at various locations in the watershed, and go out to collect data from them (using laptops) months afterwards, submitting the data to an online data repository. We'll be collaborating with MyRWA and Plymouth State, who already have citizen science volunteer networks who have been using a similar approach, but who previously needed to rely on much more expensive devices with encrypted data formats. This low-cost, open approach will allow the volunteer community to collaboratively build, maintain, and improve the sensor technology they'll be using, and share the resultant data among themselves as well as with researchers and water resource managers. We're currently basing our data logger prototype on an open source hardware project: the "[mchck](https://mchck.org/)" -- 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](https://github.com/bgamari/mchck), with datalogger functionality implemented [here](https://github.com/bgamari/data-logger). The "water quality 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)