URIs_MOMENTUM_Research_and_Innovation_Magazine_Spring_2021_M

A system of high-tech instruments and communication networks will be deployed in Narragansett Bay this year to gather real-time data about the chemistry, biology, and physical processes taking place in the marine environment.

Called the Bay Observatory, the project aims to continuously monitor algae blooms, nutrients, environmental variability and other phenomena for many years to come at two locations in the Bay. The data will be accessible to scientists, students and various stakeholders as frequently as they want it. “The Bay Observatory is essentially a floating platform similar to navigational buoys for shipping, but it includes batteries, radio beacons, solar panels and an underwater cage that can hold whatever instruments we want,” said Andrew Davies, associate professor of Biological Sciences, who is overseeing the project. “It can take records of conditions in the Bay at up to one-minute intervals over the entire year, and we don’t have to be out on a boat every day to collect the data.” Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the Observatory data will be accessed by any interested parties through the Rhode Island Data Discovery Center, an interactive platform for accessing, integrating and visualizing collected data. Yet, even before the equipment arrives on campus and is deployed for its intended purpose, new uses and applications for the Bay Observatory are under consideration, including studies of microplastics. “The way we monitor plastics now is very expensive in terms of human time,” said Davies. “The biggest problem is that water bodies are not just water and plastics, but it includes larvae, plankton, detritus, sediments, organic material from terrestrial sources, like twigs and leaves. There’s so much stuff out there that to separate the plastics from the myriad of different materials requires multiple steps and processes to get to the point where we can quantify the plastics appropriately.”

Davies currently has several undergraduate and graduate students visiting dozens of shoreline locations around the Bay with a custom-built pumping system to filter hundreds of gallons of water. They then must go through the difficult process of separating out the plastics material from other particles in the water samples. The students also deploy a manta trawl from research boats in the middle of the bay to collect larger plastic particles. Davies believes that platforms like the Bay Observatory will be able to provide the power and communications networks to operate novel sensors and samplers that can enumerate the microplastic particles in the water. “The technology is already out there, but it’s mostly being used to detect and count plankton, though it could be adapted to detect plastic particles,” he said. “We’ve also been monitoring sediments using sensors for many years, and Davies believes that platforms like the Bay Observatory will be able to provide the power and communications networks to operate novel sensors and samplers that can enumerate the microplastic particles in the water.

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