Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

Supporting freshwater ecosystems through smartphones

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Image Credit: EarthWatch/ FreshWater Watch

Project: https://freshwaterwatch.thewaterhub.org/

With FreshWater Watch app you are joining a worldwide citizen Science venture which examines the wellbeing of the world’s fresh water systems.

Fresh water is very important for supporting life. And freshwater eco-systems provide essential benefits for all living beings on the planet. However, this natural resource is very limited and needs to be regulated and preserved. As the population of the world grows, urban developmental, industrial progresses, and agricultural expansion intensifies the pressure on this resource.

To effectively deal with the world’s fresh water resources, it is important to enhance our understanding of how water quality fluctuates over landscapes and time. Shockingly, very little information is currently accessible. Such data is troublesome and tedious for researchers to accumulate, which is the place citizen scientists come in and lend a hand. With your assistance, FreshWater Watch can fill holes in our insights aroundthe globe.

You will join a system of more than 20 research projects that are being encouraged by Earthwatch with the help of the HSBC Water Program. FreshWater Watch offers a dedicated training program which educates you about fresh water issues, what can go wrong and how to examine irregularities in water bodies around you. The initiative is a joint venture of a number of research institutions, each of which is exploring specific issues around freshwater. Institutions can also devise their own bespoke project. The venture also engages teachers and pupils, often conducting workshops in geography, ecology, data gathering and scientific enquiry, with the goal of making everyone able to recognize, report anomalies and help devise strategies for water preservation.

Dive Against Debris for the Sake of Clean Oceans

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Project: https://www.projectaware.org/diveagainstdebris

Project AWARE launched the Dive against Debris app in 2011 and it has now grown tremendously since its initiation by uniting divers in over 60 countries with the goal of reporting and removing marine debris. If you’re a diver and passionate about the wonderful and amazingly mysterious ocean, you should definitely add the Project AWARE: Dive against Debris app to your smartphone. By removing the trash from the ocean, you will not only improve the ecological health of the ocean, but also lend your support to a growing movement of debris activists across the world.

With the launch of the Dive against Debris app, Scuba divers have gained a solid platform on which to learn more about the devastating impacts of trash and marine debris on human health, sea life and national economies. For majority of people, marine debris is not an issue of major concern. The unwanted plastic that floats in the ocean is something that is not bothered with because they do not come into contact with the ocean that often. So, for them marine debris quickly becomes an out-of-sight, out-of-mind issue. Scuba divers, however, come in to contact with the ocean frequently and have the potential to bring the information regarding the ecological health of the sea forward more easily.

The Dive against Debris app has been developed for both iOS and Android to help users document their dives and the debris, plastic and trash that they remove. The app allows these citizen scientists to submit data regarding the debris items that they remove include any relevant pictures with their submission and add dive site’s longitude and latitude information easily. The submission of this detailed information, from scuba divers all over the world, on the removal of debris from oceans at various locations helps scientists and researchers to address the global marine debris crisis.

The Dive against Debris app is available for download on both iOS and Android.

Feel the Wind (Power) in My Hair

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It’s tough trying to be an environmentally conscious consumer. Hybrid cars? They are still pretty pricey; get on the waiting list. Biodegradeable disposable diapers? Not at your local grocery store. Phosphate-free soaps? Only at expensive, hard-to-get-to health boutiques.

Promising solutions seem to drop out of sight. For years, I’ve heard of alternative fuel sources — everything from vegetable oil to hydrogen. These things seem to be in perpetual development; none of them ever make it to the market.

Blame Big Oil, you say? Well, maybe. Certainly there’s a lot of money to be made in oil, and the players aren’t going to leave the field without a fight. But it has to be said that sometimes, environmentalists aren’t doing us any favours either. Consider:

PRODUCT DEVELOPER: Right, so we want to talk about this amazing new technology that can convert discarded chicken parts – straight from the poultry-processing plant – into clean fuel.
ENVIRONMENTALIST: Did the chickens lead happy lives?
PD: Er, they were free-range, I think…
EN: But did they get a chance to self-actualize? Realize their full potential?
PD: Right, perhaps you’d like to see our proposal for these wind generators…
EN: Too noisy.
PD: Oh, but these are located along coastlines and more remote areas, and they’re practically silent-running.
EN: Underground, I mean. Vibration, etc. Disturbs the woodchucks.
PD: Disturbs… the… woodchucks. Okay, so, how about we talk about solar panels?
EN: Nope. Bad for bugs.
PD: How?!
EN: They get hot. Bugs land on them, and …ffft!
PD: Ffft? Ffft?!!
EN: You okay? You seem to be getting a bit hot under the collar.
PD: Must be that global warming thing.

Of course, economists are no better. Many an enthusiastic proposal has been squashed by an economist with a calculator and too much time on his hands. Inevitably they forecast that the new energy system will cost billions, even trillions, and that its benefits are doubtful. One wonders what would have been said if our current situation had been put forward as a proposal, back in the late 1800s.

FUTURIST1: Gentlemen! We must do something to replace the horse. They eat too much. They leave horse… stuff all over the place. They kick. People fall off them and break their necks. Suggestions?
FUTURIST2: I know! First, let’s drill large holes in random places until we find pockets of the liquid, rotten remains of long-dead animals and plants. Then we’ll set up expensive, smelly refineries to convert this goo into a wide variety of toxic chemicals. Meanwhile, we’ll begin paving over millions of acres of green landscape with a hard, but nevertheless non-durable, substance that will be prone to crack, break up, or develop something called “potholes” on a weekly basis and require repair. Finally we will have to find a way to transport the refined goo to distribution stations; this will occasionally result in an accident — you know, dropping several million litres in the ocean, or having something blow up now and then. All this will be to fuel the horseless carriage.

[Short pause]

FUTURIST1: Sounds good! Where do I invest?

The point is, of course, that things are in a bit of a mess, and so, yes, it’s going to cost money to fix or replace it. The solutions are not going to be perfect either — short of us leaving the planet, there is never going to be a time when we’re not disturbing something, consuming a resource, or both. So let’s just get on with whatever system will cause less damage than the one we’ve got, and we’ll figure it out from there.

I’m sure the woodchucks would agree — even the ones that are somewhat disturbed.*

* And to prove my commitment to the environment, let me just say this: No woodchucks were actually disturbed in the process of writing this column.

Photo credit: Alexander Blecher via Wikimedia Commons

 

Nappies… for science

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Project: Nappy Science Gang

As any parent knows, a baby can go through a lot of diapers, also known as nappies. Indeed, according to Mother Jones magazine, a typical baby goes through 3,800 “disposable” diapers in her first 2.5 years. And the word disposable is a bit of a misnomer: diapers hang around in landfills for decades after use.

Reusable cloth diapers are often touted as a better option, but there is some debate about whether they’re truly better because of the energy required to wash them, and the waste water that washing them produces. The Nappy Science Gang was formed to start examining questions around reusable nappy use.

A project started by  Sophia Collins, a public engagement specialist, the Nappy Science Gang not only aims to collect data, but demonstrate how science is done from start to finish.

“[Citizen science] projects are great, as far as they go, but it’s still scientists in the driving seat and members of the public are just helping them achieve their goals. Nappy Science Gang goes a step further. Volunteers come up with the questions they want to answer, they work out how they might answer those questions and design their own experiments. And then they do the experiments.”

At the moment, participants are looking at three questions, according to the blog:

  • What’s the best thing to wash cloth nappies with?
  • Is ‘strip-washing’ cloth nappies necessary? If so, what is the best method?
  • What is the optimum temperature at which to wash cloth nappies?

Experiment protocols have been designed for these questions, and tests are underway. If you’d like to participate, check out https://nappysciencegang.wordpress.com/join-the-gang/, or just follow the blog. In particular, check out this post, about how citizen science helped to change an official government recommendation.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons