Global Change Colloquium: The ecophysiometer - an open source project to support environmental monitoring. Guido Marconi (University of Cordoba)

Abstract:

Environmental inequality is a pressing issue exacerbated by the lack of environmental monitoring technologies for low-income communities. This resource shortage leads to incomplete databases with only a fraction of the relevant environmental variables being monitored. However, both policy making and scientific discovery depend on the availability of high-quality long-term data. As a response to this challenge, the Ecophysiometer project started as an open-science initiative, with the goal of providing a versatile instrument capable of measuring multiple variables with a single device. The spirit of the project is collaborative and its being designed so that future users can develop and share customized methods and data. Concretely, the instrument is a raspberry pi operated spectrometer. It is designed to measure visible spectra of transmittance through an aqueous sample, as well as their corresponding emission spectra of fluorescence, at 7 excitation wavelengths. The richness of data generated by this equipment allows the development of so called chemometric methods that circumvent the need for cumbersome sample processing or adapting the hardware. This talk will be an introduction to the working principles of this apparatus, a walk through our experience made during its development, concluding with two application cases. I hope it is also the start point of debate on which variables are the most important when trying to describe “ecosystem-health”.

Location: CIV 060 (basement), RPTU in Landau

or: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/64923536234?pwd=eDZ2TUNaYUU3MHNrRXNmYUkvdW9nZz09

Start: 18:00