(Lightly edited for readability)
Speakers: Grinson George, Rajeev Ahal, Philipp Olbrich, Subhra Priyadarshini
00:02 Support announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance
00:27 Subhra Priyadarshini: Hello and welcome to the Nature India podcast. I'm your host Subhra Priyadarshini. In this episode of our podcast series "Our mobile world", we are talking about how the mobile phone is changing the way researchers and scientists monitor our immediate environment so that we can take measures to protect our air, water and soil, conserve species of flora and fauna that need our attention and make predictions for the future of the planet.
How does the mobile phone help them detect, observe and measure environmental conditions at a specific site or location? Mobile devices embedded with sensors such as accelerometers, compasses, GPSs, microphones and cameras are quite handy in collecting data on air quality, air pollution, noise levels, and other environmental parameters. There's a bunch of possibilities to use these capabilities of a smartphone in solving some real world problems. Just to give you an example of what I mean, let me take you to Kochi to the central Marine Fisheries Research Institute where a mobile application called TurbAqua helps scientists easily transmit data in near real time to measure the color and clarity of water. Grinson George, head of marine biodiversity and environment Management at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research tells us why and how they do it.
02:10 Grinson George: The prime concern we have is our drinking water source gets contaminated, basically because the hygienic practices we have with respect to the septic tank management is not so good. So, when it comes to septic tank management, we know that in India people have much more mobile phones than toilets.
02:28 Subhra Priyadarshini: So then how exactly are you using the mobile phone to monitor water quality?
02:34 Grinson George: So, we are utilizing these two possibilities in a mobile phone. The first way we are trying to assess based on water colour is an indication of something related to the water quality. Even when a glass of drinking water is given to you, you may find it difficult to drink the water if the colour is not as per your choice. you want to have drinking water with the perfect transparent nature. If it is brownish, we feel like there is some muddy substance in it. If it is greenish, we feel that there is algal material. So depending upon the colour of the water, in general, humans have a perception that the colour of water indicates the quality of the water also. A scientific addition to this, what we did was we developed a disc -- it's a small 3D printed paper-based equipment which can have a printed water colour code. This indicates a code from 1 to 21. Water can have different colours -- it can start with plain or blue or green or yellow to brown, codes to identify the colour of the water. Second thing using the disc we can measure the turbidity of the water. We are mainly using the discs, its a simple measurement so that we can enrol more people and this equipment is very cheap, in less than $80 we can get one equipment.
03:53 Subhra Priyadarshini: And I understand that you made very good use of this technology to monitor the quality of water in Kerala's Vembanad Lake.
04:01 Grinson George: For example, I tried with Vembanad lake. Vembanad lake is a place with a lot of tourism importance, a lot of farming importance, a lot of aquaculture importance and at least 18 to 20 colleges affiliated to different universities in Kerala are situated on the banks of this lake. So we can use the student population who are interested in doing some research on the water quality aspect using these devices. So they were making using the mobile camera and they were sending me all this information and it was going to our server. So I could almost map the entire Vembanad lake using the colour pattern these people have sent me. Mobile phones have a facility of geo tagging also. So the point from where they are collecting the information, the geotag information is coming to me we can give them back some sort of advisory -- what is the quality of the water. This is especially good in times of flooding. We can use this information and disseminate this information to the multiple users who are really troubled by the problems of the flood. The only problem that we face is, in different types of mobile phones the sensor quality of the image varies. So the colour can have some variation. This subjectivity is always there. But we have tried with our own different applications and we could ascertain with some sort of scientific significance that most of the results were qualitatively very good to come up with some initial results of water quality. And most of our applications are suited to the Android platform, not to the iOS platform. So this sort of difficulties are there, but we are trying to venture into something which can give good results with small investment.
05:40 Subhra Priyadarshini: Many monitoring applications are generating information about environment quality indices around us, like the Hawa Badlo app by the Supreme Court-appointed Environmental Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPA) that allows people in Delhi and the National Capital Region to report incidences of air pollution. Then there's the Water Watch mobile app developed by the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata that gives citizens the power to assess and report river water quality parameters, such as dissolved oxygen, pH, and turbidity. Also, Mira, Bengaluru's lake monitoring app that helps citizens learn from each other and find simple small and science based ways to care for the lakes. The collected data helps researchers monitor water quality and identify pollution sources. So mobile phones provide the easiest access to data helping plan and execute scientific studies on the go.
06:48 Grinson George: When people go for sampling, or we have people who are interested in knowing about the marine fishes, so when they go to the landing centre, or they find something peculiar, they take a photograph and immediately post it in the WhatsApp group, then there is a debate happening in the WhatsApp group. It involves scientists technicians, those people who are experienced, retired, some people who have interest in marine fisheries, we have a good mechanism by which all these people can be brought together, this can be either in the form of a WhatsApp group, or in the form of a dissemination mechanism, where these groups can be linked to a server, using a mobile application. And dissemination of data becomes much easier and we generate a lot of data. Crowdsourced databases for scientific studies are becoming a common thing now. we can do things very cheap, we can have access to information from a remote location. For example, if a scientist has to go to a remote location, the scientists will find a solution if a person is having a mobile phone and he can collect that information and send to him. We can save a lot of cost. Then there are this mobile camera based or mobile speaker based information being collected. For example, if somebody is interested in monitoring the sound levels like when we are speaking, we are checking whether any background noise is coming or not. So same way, if sound sensors can be much better in some mobile phones. I have not done the research, this is some out of box thinking. They can even monitor such levels also. There are mechanisms by which we can create awareness among people. Being a scientist who's involved in biodiversity and environment management, I am leading a team of scientists we and we find this very useful in our scientific studies also.
08:24 Subhra Priyadarshini: So much can be done with just a click of these little loaded devices in our hands. How easy or glitch free are these apps?
08:32 Grinson George: When they click the application if they click yes, the GPS is automatically enabled. So, either when they go to the college or during their free time, they can go to the nearest lake water body where there is sufficient depth and they can use this particular equipment or disc. This disc is lowered into the water body and the point at which the disc is disappearing and reappearing, from that depth, we are able to calculate the turbidity of the water body. So, basically, we are trying to see the optical budget of this particular water body. Optical budget is controlled by optical constituents present in this water body that can be the total suspended sediments in the case of algae. We developed our own application called TurbAqua, i. e. Turbidity in Aquatic System. This mobile application is available in Google Play Store, anyone in India can download it. So, you can imagine at least 10 images are coming from one person, the type of database it can generate. So as to sustain this programme, there should be some interest for the stakeholders who are providing data using mobiles. For example, if I am giving a data from my location to the mobile phone, I will be interested as a stakeholder, maybe as a tourism operator, I would like to know which all areas in my location have less turbidity. So I can take tourists to that particular location. We are trying to develop some sort of advisories. Farmers maybe Interested in different quality of water, so we can use such advisories for the farmers. If a blue colour, which is not beneficial to an aquaculture activity, we can tell that this blue is present in this particular location, what the associated diseases are, it's increasing because of the increase in microbial load with the changes in the climate, particularly temperature. So if we can give an epidemiological model output to this stakeholder group, we can do marvelous decision making with respect to the containment of diseases. People are losing 14% of their actual working days because of acute diarrhoeal diseases, so we can try to avoid such things by giving advisories.
10:45 Subhra Priyadarshini: Mobile phones also play a crucial role in disaster management. They can be used for early warning systems, emergency communication and coordination during natural disasters. Researchers can analyze the data collected during such events to improve disaster preparedness and response strategies. Here's Rajeev Ahal, Director for natural resource management and agro-ecology in GIZ, the German International Development Cooperation Agency in India, talking about two very interesting aspects of cell phone use for environment monitoring.
11:24 Rajeev Ahal: I think one is the unique case of India with about 1.3 billion people, and as of now, almost 1.2 billion people having mobile phones, Out of which almost 600 million or half are smartphone users. The other aspect, of course, is not just this big and wide penetration, but the very low data costs in India, probably one of the lowest in the world, which really leads to a huge usage of this platform. And I think another important dimension that is unique to India when we work globally is the way a whole digital public infrastructure has been created, which is not just driven by private sector alone, but the government is at the heart of it. So, really looking at population scale interventions, this level of mobile use is unprecedented in many places.
12:16 Subhra Priyadarshini: Right. So, this is not just useful for researchers, but also policymakers.
12:21 Rajeev Ahal: If you look at the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA project in India, where assets like dams, check dams, soil conservation works, vegetation plantation -- active measures to shape the environment and regulate adapt and make it more resilient -- are being implemented, then you would find it very amazing that almost every asset is geotagged and available in the public domain. So, therefore making the government investments and the interventions mapped, known and available transparently for all people, I think this is a very interesting aspect of joint monitoring and development of environmental projects and processes.
13:08 Subhra Priyadarshini: Philipp Olbrich advisor at GIZ says the use of mobile phone based crowdsource data in conjunction with satellite imagery makes it a very powerful tool.
13:21 Philipp Olbrich: So if you think about mobile phones as data collection devices, in a sense, then people can use it to report on their immediate environment and this can culminate in various number of use cases. So you can think of using mobile phones to map wildfires or monitor crop health, or even the health of our forests. The really interesting part here for us often times is to combine this information, these local experts with information we gather from satellite imagery. So satellite images, of course offer a way to create standardized information about the environment at scale, often on a global scale. And if you combine this information with locally sourced data from citizen scientists, this can become a really powerful tool to measure or to surveil how pests, for example, develop in a geographical area, or how forest health has developed over time.
14: 19 Rajeev Ahal: So using satellite imagery provided through phones and planning done on the ground has resulted with almost 280,000 of the concerts in India are the 290,000 panchayats, who have developed a GPS-based satellite imagery-driven plans on how to implement environmental and livelihood interventions over the next three to four years.
14:45 Subhra Priyadarshini: That is an incredible reach and a great example of how scientists and planners are combining technologies to save the planet. Indeed, the more we learn about how the smartphone invades the lives and works of researchers, the more awe inspiring it is. Stay tuned to the series "Our mobile world" for more fascinating examples of how these little gadgets have become an integral part of our lives and astound us with their multi functionality. Subscribe to the Nature India podcast on your favourite podcast platform. We will come to you soon with another very interesting episode of "Our mobile world". This is your host Subhra Priyadarshini.
15:48 Support announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.