Core requirements and approaches for low-cost water quality monitoring systems
Christian Noss
Presentation: 28.10.2013, 11:15 am [Video]
Discussion: 28.10.2013, 11:30 am [Discussion]
This work is based on the presentation ‘Monitoring Water Quality through Low Cost Tracking and Crowd Sourcing: Tracking of Test Organisms’ (M.H. Ruiz, C. Noss, E. Niehaus; UNOCA, Bonn 2012). On basis of an exemplary study investigating sub-lethal mechanical stress of a nanomaterial on zooplankton, we will emphasize mandatory parameters and discuss essential prerequisites and boundary conditions of the tracking system, which are joined to the successful determination of these parameters. A comparison between a commercial and a self-developed system highlights the applicability for the target organism-behavior analyses but also the limitations in flexibility for tracking other organisms and behaviors. Finally, a low-cost approach and corresponding modifications of the self-developed tracking system and algorithm offering a high degree of flexibility will be discussed in more detail. This approach is particularly suitable for monitoring of water quality through crowd sourcing.
