So while perusing available sensors on Sparkfun.com, I found exactly what I hoped I would find, a dissolved oxygen sensor. No, really.
The quality of water in the bays on eastern Long Island is always a concern and something we write about quite often at The Press
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Basically, and I’m over-simplifying this because I’m not a scientist, nitrogen from yard fertilizers and septic systems run off into enclosed saltwater bays, overfeeding underwater plant life and causing it to grow. You’d think that was a good thing, but the plants (seagrasses, etc.) draw needed oxygen out of the water (dissolved oxygen, or DO). Fish and other marine life need that oxygen, too, so when the level of dissolved oxygen decreases, the marine life die off because they basically suffocate to death.
So as a news organization, we’re always reporting on “fish kills” and other environmental issues int he bays AFTER the fact. And we rely on various scientific and environmental organizations to describe the condition of the bays and the DO levels.
How cool would it be to have the dissolved oxygen kit sensor from Sparkfun to be able to get DO levels either before conditions got to a crisis stage, or, afterward to be able to get our own readings to help the reader understand what happened without relying on the scientific data.
Maybe we could even set up a few senors around town and have a live feed to our website, so that readers could track the DO levels over time. We could incorporate it into an interactive map, so readers could click around and see how different bays are doing.
I think that would be pretty proactive journalism.