Halfway There

            The value of interdisciplinary work is tremendous. As is especially the case for engineers such as myself, researchers have a tendency to tunnel in on their project or field. In this pursuit of higher knowledge, they forget the “daily applicability” and “immediate public impact” aspects of research, which cannot be underrated. Having tunneled my fair share already this summer, I am reminded of why I chose to spend my summer in Menomonie, not to create a new chemical filter(as was my original hope) but ultimately to make a proverbial dent in the efforts to clear Lake Menomin for safe use. 

I’ve learned how to pursue this best as an engineer from two other disciplines, biology and psychology. My partner Cody and I started working with the biology team very early on in our research process. At first, they provided us with knowledge about the remediation abilities of ecosystems such as wetlands. But the most important information they provided us was that there was little to no hard data on Lake Menomin’s nutrient levels and health. Moreover, the data that did exist was not on a platform where it was easily readable and any researcher could obtain it. Learning this inspired our engineering team to change our focus from water purification to water monitoring.

We hope that our data will help limnologists studying questions such as whether the reservoir has become anoxic or whether primary production is happening at a faster rate than secondary production can compete with. The repetition of measurements multiple times a day can help these scientists determine under what circumstances anomalies will occur.

This far into the program, it has become clear that solving a problem with an expensive and complex solution is not “solving” at all, it is only getting halfway there. It is essential to mobilize the people of Menomonie to be able to take care of their lake and carry the work of researchers after research programs reach their conclusion, so that technology produced does its due diligence. Using a LoRA network to generate data for lake health and publishing this data for free on the web will increase public visibility and bolsters citizen science, enabling more people to understand the nuances of the problem as well as the part that they can play in improving the situation. 

In addition to working with biology, we’ve learned from psychology. The psych team mentor, Sarah, suggested that we keep User Interface/User Design in mind when creating our website or app that we’re going to push data to. A good user interface and data that is expressed in an interactive or layman terms fashion increases the amount of individuals that are able to make use of the data and be part of the solution. There is a large barrier of understanding between much of the general public and technological solutions, but we want to bridge that divide in our project. 

In the next couple of days, the engineering team will be constructing the physical setup for our sensing units, which will utilize a LoRA(long-range) network to communicate and collect data. We are excited to see what this last portion of the project will yield for us and our colleagues.