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Increased scale and accessibility of sediment transport research in rivers through practical, open-source turbidity and depth sensors

Nature Water volume 1, pages 760–768 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Open-source designs for turbidity and depth sensors are becoming increasingly capable and available, but the knowledge required to construct them limits their use compared with expensive, commercial sensors. Here we present an open-source optical backscatter and water pressure sensor that can be ordered almost fully assembled, requires no coding to deploy and costs approximately 50 USD. We share three examples of these sensors’ ability to facilitate new research. First, we observed complex changes in spatial and temporal patterns of suspended sediment transport in the Arctic Sagavanirktok River using a network of sensors. Second, we measured turbidity during the freeze-up period in the Tanana River, a period of high risk to sensors. Last, we built and deployed sensors with middle-school students to monitor turbidity under full ice cover on the Tanana River. The success of open-source sensors in these examples shows a marked increase in scale and accessibility of river science.

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Fig. 1: The physical layout of the OpenOBS-328 logger and sensors.
Fig. 2: Overview of OpenOBS installation and resulting depth and turbidity data on the Sagavanirktok River.
Fig. 3: Hysteresis plots for three periods on the Sagavanirktok River.
Fig. 4: Overview of the OpenOBS-328 installation and turbidity data on the Tanana River.
Fig. 5: Installation of an OpenOBS-328 sensor and the resulting data on the Tanana River from the work with the middle-school students.

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Code availability

Documentation for building, calibrating, using and interpreting the OpenOBS-328 is available on our documentation site: https://tedlanghorst.github.io/OpenOBS-328/. Up-to-date files and code for the sensor design are available at the full repository path: https://github.com/tedlanghorst/OpenOBS-328 and archived at https://zenodo.org/record/8136530. The project is distributed with the GNU General Public License v3: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html. Some of the libraries in the sensor firmware are modified from existing open-source projects and have retained other licences; these are documented in the directory of each library.

Data availability

Data and code for creating the figures shown in this manuscript are archived at https://zenodo.org/record/8136526.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the students at the Nenana City School and their teacher, B. Gerald, as well as the CyberLynx students and their coordinator, J. Stone, for their participation and help with building sensors. We also thank the Toolik Field Station staff, organized by A. Young, for their help retrieving our sensors from the Sagavanirktok River at the end of the 2022 summer season. This sensor development and work on the Tanana River was supported by NSF grant 2153778 (PI E.E.). The data collection on the Sagavanirktok River was supported by The Preston Jones and Mary Elizabeth Frances Dean Martin Trust Fund in the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NSF grant 1748653 (PI C.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Theodore Langhorst, Tamlin Pavelsky, Lillian Cooper & Julianne Davis

  2. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Emily Eidam

  3. University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA

    Katie Spellman, Sarah Clement, Christopher Arp & Allen Bondurant

  4. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Elisa Friedmann & Colin Gleason

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Contributions

T.L., E.E. and L.C. developed the OpenOBS-328 sensors and testing methodologies. T.L. and T.P. conceived the manuscript. T.L. wrote the manuscript and analysed the data. T.L., T.P., E.E., L.C., J.D., K.S., S.C., C.A., A.B., E.F. and C.G. participated in field work efforts and provided data for this manuscript. All authors reviewed the results and draft manuscript.

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Correspondence to Theodore Langhorst.

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Nature Water thanks Vincent Raimbault, Jessica Droujko and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Integrated supplementary information

Extended Data Fig. 1 OpenOBS-328 Sensor Performance.

a) Distribution of calibration error based on 72 OpenOBS-328 sensors and 3 RBR sensors. The boxplot centers represent the median values, and edges of the boxes represent the 25th and 75th percentiles. The whiskers extend to 1.5 times the inter-quartile range of the data. Points beyond the whiskers are plotted as open circles. b) Estimated and tested battery life for non-rechargeable Lithium Thionyl Chloride (Li-SOCl2; 2000 mAh) and rechargeable Lithium-Ion (Li-ion; 800 mAh) AA-size batteries. The disconnected points at 1 s for each battery represent continuous mode and the lines greater than 5 s represent measurement intervals with low-power sleep between measurements. Estimates are extrapolated from the current draw measurements. Tested values represent programming a sensor and letting it fully run down a new battery in a laboratory environment.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–8.

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Langhorst, T., Pavelsky, T., Eidam, E. et al. Increased scale and accessibility of sediment transport research in rivers through practical, open-source turbidity and depth sensors. Nat Water 1, 760–768 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00124-2

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