Public Lab Research note


Announcing an ioby + Public Lab partnership

by warren | January 15, 2014 16:21 15 Jan 16:21 | #9945 | #9945

Hello all -- we wanted to briefly announce a new initiative in partnership with ioby, a locally-focused crowdfunding platform.

We've been looking for ways to help local, site-specific projects raise funds, both for long-term monitoring, and to develop new tools and techniques for environmental data collection. These projects provide a window into some of the most vibrant independent place-based research in the Public Lab network, revealing environmental issues of high priority to local residents -- issues which government or industry have often overlooked.

The partner page, titled “Community Science with Public Lab” features five flagship projects:

http://publiclab.org/ioby



Please take a look -- we hope that these will be the first of many!

Featured project of the week

Each week, we'll be featuring one of the ioby projects, and our first will be the Refinery Flare Monitoring project posted by Dan Beavers. This exciting proposal seeks to develop and install a series of prototype 24-hour monitoring stations based on the Public Lab spectrometry kit to attempt to identify contaminants such as heavy metals in gas refinery flares, as shown below.

This is an exciting application of open hardware tools to an urgent environmental problem -- contaminants being vented immediately adjacent to residential communities! -- and we are eager to see what the Gulf Coast Public Lab community is able to accomplish. If round-the-clock monitoring were truly affordable, gas refineries could be held accountable for what they vent so close to populated areas.

Please consider contributing today to get these monitors built and installed!

refinery-watching


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