Alex Dornburg

Alex Dornburg

Jan 09, 2017

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Building underwater light sensors (DIY Buoy!)

First of all, thank to everyone who is already backing this project! Your interest in our work, and support means so much! 

One of the key aspects of this study will be assessing levels of water turbidity across different sites. To measure this ourselves, since satellite data will be insufficient, we plan on building our own buoys! 

This past year Raul Bardaji and his colleagues introduced the KdUINO DIY Buoy, a low cost solution to measuring light attenuation. Using open-source software and readily available consumer electronics, this device measure irradiance at different depths, automatically calculates the diffuse attenuation coefficient (Kd), and stores this data on an SD card that can be downloaded from a mobile phone. 

This means we can place multiple buoys across a site and collect weeks (or even months) of accurate water clarity data with minimal effort. With these data we will not only be able to see how fish color diversity relates to water turbidity, but also model how fish perceive each other as water quality changes. These data will also provide an important baseline for comparing our work to surveys of other organisms, like corals. 

These buoys are easy to construct, and have been used previously in a citizen science project that enabled high school students to measure seawater quality (See this page). The entire system is outlined in the graphic below.  

Bardaji and colleagues compared the quality of data these buoys collect to high end units and found the data values to be virtually identical. 

If this project is backed, we will be building several of these units over the next couple of months, and testing them locally before deploying them on the reefs. The data collected from these buoys will not only be valuable for this project, but also provide critical baseline data for future work on this reef system. 

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About This Project

The incredible diversity of colors displayed by coral reef fishes is one the most striking yet poorly understood aspects of their biology. We will measure both fish color and environmental light attenuation to develop an understanding of how color evolves in reef fishes. This conceptual framework will allow us to forecast how contemporary changes to reef habitats, especially those in water clarity, will impact coral reef ecosystems and conservation initiatives in the near future.

More Lab Notes From This Project

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