PPSR: Blending cultural and environmental resilience with contemporary technology: cutting-edge environmental sensor workshop for loko i`a

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

With funding from a previous OCE award (1538697), Dr. Glazer recently developed low-cost sea level and water monitoring sensors and has successfully deployed these sensors in a local fishpond, Paepae o He`eia, on the island of Oahu. These sensors are an important innovation that will supplement or replace data from monitoring devices that previously cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit. The objective of this workshop is to make the new instruments widely available to the public in Hawaii for understanding spatial and temporal variability of coastal water level and tidal processes that threaten communities through nuisance flooding and sea level rise. The two-day workshop will train Hawaiian community members to assemble, install and use the new sensors at fishponds located throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The PI will order all sensor parts, pre-assemble difficult/critical components, 3D print custom housing chassis components, and assemble DIY kits with fabrication documentation to distribute to about forty workshop participants during the hands-on sensor assembly and training sessions. The DIY sensor kits will allow Hawaiian communities to monitor and quantify in near-real-time coastal tides, inundation, and beach run-up risks. After the workshop, the PI will continue to engage participants, coordinate data feeds, maintain data archives, and provide web visualization tools using crowd-sourced data from the newly assembled and deployed sensor kits. Workshop co-organizing partner Kua'Aina Ulu 'Auamo (KUA) will facilitate post-workshop assessments and surveys. Ultimately, the data produced by these sensors will allow scientists to access data with an accuracy and spatial scale that was not previously possible. Intellectual Merit: The structure of the proposed workshops and the general plan for encouraging productive interactions between scientists and members of the public is well developed. Community partners, including the grassroots non-profit organization KUA and the Kamehameha Schools, are supporting various portions of the workshop, demonstrating significant interest by the public in this effort. The workshop will focus on an important scientific question that is highly relevant to the local communities, and the resulting data will potentially transform the capability for monitoring and predicting coastal hydrology, inundation, and nuisance flooding by augmenting NOAA tide gauge spatial variability at unprecedented scales . Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this workshop are especially strong. The workshop will support public participation in scientific research and will increase public understanding of critical environmental issues. The end result will be a ?mentored citizen scientist? approach that leads to reliable crowd-sourced coastal observatory data.