CoPe: EAGER: Collaborative Research: Development of A Novel, Mobile Coastal Observatory for Quantifying Coastal Carbon Cycling by Professional and Citizen Scientists

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Coastal zones provide a host of ecosystem services, including sequestering carbon dioxide produced by human activities. To date, quantification of coastal carbon sequestration (e.g., "Blue Carbon") and emissions are limited by an inability to adequately resolve spatial and temporal patterns of carbon concentrations and fluxes. This project embraces a new approach for the deployment, collection, and analysis of data for the goals of increasing our understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of coastal carbon cycling while simultaneously reducing barriers to accessing new technologies and empowering a range of stakeholders to collect and share data. This project will address the challenge of broader access by developing a local/regional HUB for sharing in situ sensors. This project leverages the "Share-Economy" human-technology relationship as a model (e.g., Zipcar, Airbnb) that may be adapted with "goods" and "services" re-defined by the activities of scientific data collection, instruments, and knowledge dissemination. The success of this model has wide ranging implications for how we develop and use other sensors and technology for understanding central processes in the functioning of our planet. This project will contribute not only an increased understanding of coastal carbon cycling, but also a new model for sensor sharing that will be widely applicable to other ecosystems and data collection needs. The results of this project will be disseminated widely through publications, conference presentations, press releases, and outreach to the public. For example, this project will engage a variety of users through sensor development workshops held at relevant conferences, and will engage the public through a free public lecture series at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) on "ZipScience: A 21st century approach to enabling the broad community to access emerging technologies." This project aims to quantify spatial and temporal patterns of carbon concentrations and fluxes in coastal ecosystems and to share this ability with a wide variety of end users. To do so, this project will develop novel "sensor systems" that leverage state-of-the-art, off-the shelf, commercial detectors and communication technologies. During this effort, this project will also entail the explicit recruitment and engagement of stakeholders (as well as computer scientists who specialize in online data management / presentation) to assess the value and sustainability of a "sensor-sharing" program that would allow stakeholders to check out, deploy, and return these systems to the local/regional hubs. Specifically, this project will develop wireless, easily portable sensor networks that: 1) quantify in situ inorganic carbon concentrations and fluxes as well as pH, temperature, oxygen, and other factors in coastal environments using industrial sensor technologies; 2) collect and preserve water, enabling a variety of lab-based investigations from microbiology to microplastic quantification; 3) use widespread cellular communications to pass data to a cloud-based web platform that will complete first-pass online data processing for rapid, online, and open-access visualizations. This project also includes a robust needs-based assessment to plan the next phase of coastal in situ sensor networks. As part of this assessment, these sensors will be employed by many different stakeholders for widespread data collection and processing. This project will then assess if a "rental and/or loan model" is a practical solution to meet broader community needs. Through workshops at relevant scientific meetings, and individual stakeholder interviews, this project will assess opportunities and challenges to widespread adoption of these core sensor packages, and develop a long-term strategy for inclusion of other sensors as well as sensor needs beyond what this project covers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.