Monitor My Watershed: An Online Data Portal and Visualization Tool for Open-source Environmental Monitoring

Abstract:

Monitor My Watershed is a free online data portal that lets you discover and map monitoring data, and also share and compare your data with the world. It is the user end-point of an end-to-end hardware and software system that currently hosts almost 500 real-time data feeds from scientists, citizens, educators, and resource managers. Our objective is that this growing community of users and their water, soil, and atmospheric data will augment other publically-available data sources and advance learning, research, and environmental management at the watershed scale. To facilitate broad adoption and use of Monitor My Watershed, Stroud Water Research Center provides an educational support system to help people learn to build and connect environmental monitoring devices to the portal. EnviroDIY.org provides instruction, learning resources, and a peer-to-peer forum for exchanging information and techniques for do-it-yourself environmental monitoring projects. The Mayfly Data Logger (an Arduino-based, open-source product of Stroud Water Research Center) plays a central role in many of these projects because it simplifies connection with bare-wire, commercially-available environmental sensors and radio communications. Data logger programming and instruction is provided in the open-source ModularSensors library, a collection of configuration files for the Arduino platform that includes drivers for dozens of sensors, unifies data requests from them, implements power optimization, SD card logging, and Wi-Fi and cellular connections. The end result of this open-source system of education and training is data publishing to the Monitor My Watershed data portal. The portal is built using a Django - gunicorn - nginx framework. In addition to the PostgreSQL Django application database, sensor data is stored in a separate PostgreSQL ODM2 database and a high-performance influx database. Users add new data to the database by either a REST API using POST requests initiated by a data logger or by a csv upload using the web application. In addition to the map view, search function, and sparkline plots provided in the Monitor My Watershed data portal, a separate Web Time Series Analyst application provides long term data visualizations. Data is shared between the two applications using WaterML and the influx database.