EnviroDIY: A community and resources for do-it-yourself environmental science and monitoring

Abstract:

EnviroDIY is an online initiative to build a community of do-it-yourself, environmental monitoring enthusiasts. The EnviroDIY.org website hosts a forum, user-contributed blog, instructional resources, videos, and tutorials used by over 600 registered members interested in water, soil, and atmospheric monitoring. Open-source electronic hardware and code are at the heart of EnviroDIY, and the Arduino-based Mayfly Data Logger (a product developed by Stroud Water Research Center) serves as the open-source foundation for many environmental sensing projects featured on the site. While EnviroDIY serves all interests in environmental monitoring, we have a strong focus on water monitoring. We recently documented an open-source design for a streamside, solar powered, 4G connected, temperature, conductivity, depth, turbidity, and oxygen monitoring station. The station can be programmed using Arduino sketches we curate on Github.com/Envirodiy (the Modular Sensors repository) to post data to an online (free) data portal called Monitor My Watershed (MonitorMyWatershed.org). This data portal hosts hundreds of monitoring sites and provides an interactive data visualization tool. The EnviroDIY initiative is unique in the environmental, open-source, community-led space because of the deep integration of education and training resources, a commercially-available, open-source data logger, open-source code repositories, and a data portal and visualization tool.