DIY Kits for Ocean Monitoring

Marine technology is crucial to monitor, understand and valuate Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services (MCES). However, these technologies are known to be expensive, and this condition often causes dependency between small islands and richer nations and mainland territories. In order to empower local communities and promote emancipation and sustainable education we are developing low-cost DIY kits for ocean monitoring as a critical design program that stems from the REDEMA project (Redesigning Madeira: Using Speculative Design to Re-think Energy Policy and Consumer Behaviour). The DIY kits aim at fostering local maker culture, marine science, technology education and sustainability with low-cost environmental monitoring for small islands. Through this program we explore knowledge and technology transfer between outer regions by providing a DIY environmental monitoring platform that can be proposed as a learning curriculum.

The making process of the DIY platform is supported by a free and open source curriculum to build, test and deploy each part of the system kit. When completed, the monitoring platform is able to monitor wave dynamics (Significant Wave Height, Period and Direction) and we are currently extending the platform to include various water quality monitoring sensors (Sea Surface Temperature, Salinity, Ph and Dissolved Oxygen).