CloudHack - Bentónicos| Smash your SDGs!

Project Details

Awards & Nominations

CloudHack - Bentónicos has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Smash your SDGs!

Your challenge is to develop creative solutions that use Earth observations to address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and foster sustainable development worldwide. Use NASA and other Earth observing satellites’ data as well as information generated by crowd-sourcing and in-situ measurements to create practical applications that support environmental and societal policy across water, health, food security and/or land use domains.

Benthic app

Our main aim is to provide a way of making science fun and available for high school students, while also generating useful information for scientists about water quality in the country.

CloudHack - Bentónicos

Introduction

We all know the importance of having access to high quality water for sustainable development. Something is definitely lacking in the way we teach at schools since these issues are rarely included in the curriculum. So what if we taught our youth, the next generation, how to take an active stance and check for themselves the water quality using the scientific method? Not only you would be raising people interested in science, but also it could tackle the specific problems of each region.

While it's easy to take access to drinking water for granted, around 2 billion people worldwide lack such privilege. Our platform allows teachers and students to help their communities by studying water quality in rivers. They are able to do this at a low cost by analyzing the presence of benthic macroinvertebrates, which are a reliable bioindicator of water quality. This programme enables people to learn about their environment, the signs nature gives us when we don't protect it, and to start thinking what to do when the water we have access to is polluted.

Background

Benthic macroinvertebrates consists on small aquatic animals and insects in their aquatic larval stages (United States Environmental Protection Agency, EPA). Based on the premise that biotic communities respond to changes in water (their habitat) quality, their responses are integrated indicators of the state of the biotic and abiotic variables representing stream health. (Kenney, M. et al, 2009).

As Mandaville (2002) says, some advantages of using benthic macroinvertebrates as water quality indicators are that they are everywhere and in abundant rates. They are also sedentary, which allows determination of the spatial extent of a perturbation. And finally, they provide evidence of conditions over long periods of time.

About the app

Our prototype app has two main functions: identify and analyze.

“Identify” allows users to establish which species they are looking at by answering a series of multiple choice questions (macroinvertebrates identification key). This is a standard method used by scientists known as an identification key, transformed into an interactive and guided questionnaire, which is easier for students to follow and requires only basic training.

“Analyze” is where users can load into our system the data they have collected, such as water and air temperature, date, time, width and depth of the river, flow rate, and most importantly quantity of macroinvertebrates found, by type This is uploaded to a public repository for scientists and general public to use freely. The user receives a water quality report indicating whether it is polluted or not that takes into account biodiversity reported by the user together with all the noticed differences with previous reports and scientific research.

About the kit

We have also developed “kit MeFiQui” (kit de Mediciones Físicoquímicas del agua, kit for physicochemical measurements of water), which includes all tools and materials needed to fully take advantage of the app’s analyze function. It includes a thermometer, a ph meter, a tape measure, alcohol, a magnifying glass, and a strainer. Students are only expected to provide a container such as a jar, and a basic smartphone to use the app and take time measurements

Impact

We seek to:

  • Educate future generations about one of our world’s most important resources, water.
  • Allow communities to learn how safe is the water they have access to.
  • Inform people of how to preserve those natural water resources and open the conversation in the classrooms.
  • Develop tools so that teachers can teach science with as few barriers as possible.

Bibliography

Link of the app: https://github.com/cloudhackapp/bentonicos