Recently, the Metabolic Foundation had a replication session of their air quality sensor “the first airbender”, in connection with their Surfside Science project.
“If all goes well, they will replicate this and we’ll have our 2nd airbender”, the organizers commented on a post on their Facebook Page. “Our good friend of the foundation Jeff and our new intern Steven studying at the University of Aruba are working on it.”
“One of our main goals is to make all our environment monitoring methods replicable and affordable. This way we want to stimulate any other islands that also have a lack of data to start to collect their data as well. So everything we develop and collect will be open source”, they said.
Back in August, Metabolic Foundation announced its Surfside Science project, which focuses on methods for measuring the quality of air and sea water, changes in the coast landscape and vegetation in the bottom of the ocean. Surfside Science is a project that received financing from RESEMBID, which is a fund of the European Union managed by Expertise France, the collaboration agency for French development that manages projects in the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT), which include Aruba and 11 other islands in the Caribbean.
The Surfside Science project will have duration of one year, and during that year, Metabolic Foundation will test different methods that can be used to automate data collection on Aruba’s coasts, both on land and in the ocean itself, close to the coast. Mettes indicated that these methods are more affordable than traditional method, and the foundation tries to make them more applicable in order that they can also be used by people who are not scientists themselves.
To guarantee that the methods are trustworthy, throughout the year the foundation will be working together with marine ecologist and environmental engineer Tatiana Becker, who will compare the results that Metabolic Foundation measures with the results that she will measure using standard methods generally used in science. With this, the foundation hopes to prove that their methods can be applied on more beaches around Aruba.
For more information, please visit science.brenchies.com.
