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EPA Publishes EnviroDIY-Based Monitoring Results

By Scott Ensign on No Comments

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has come full circle with EnviroDIY and the Mayfly Data Logger. A team of EPA scientists developed a roof rainwater sensing-recording-grading system, tested it over a six month period, and recently published the results in Environmental Science and Technology: Water.

This full-circle journey started in 2016 with funding from the EPA’s Environmental Education Model Grants Program. Under this grant, Stroud Water Research Center developed a multi-day workshop curriculum on using the Mayfly Data Logger for water monitoring. The workshop was piloted with watershed organizations in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota, North Dakota, Virginia, and Maryland, as well as five schools in Pennsylvania.

Shannon Hicks instructs high school teachers on the use of EnviroDIY technology at the Stroud Center.
Shannon Hicks, the Stroud Center’s electrical engineer, instructs high school teachers on the use of EnviroDIY technology at the Stroud Center in 2017 as part of the “Greening STEM Technologies” grant from the EPA.

Lessons learned from this EPA project informed how the Stroud Center scaled up the EnviroDIY workshop curriculum for use in the Delaware River Watershed Initiative. From 2017 to 2025, the Stroud Center led 50 non-profit watershed organizations across the Delaware River watershed in EnviroDIY-based river monitoring.

A quick summary of how EnviroDIY and the Monitor My Watershed Data Sharing Portal were put to work for the DRWI was published in Eos, while a data-crunching analysis of the monitoring data was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

electronic monitoring hardware
A Penn State Master Watershed Steward attends to an EnviroDIY Monitoring Station deployed for the Delaware River Watershed Initiative in 2019.

The EPA’s involvement with EnviroDIY came full circle in February 2024, when the Stroud Center provided a workshop to staff at EPA’s Office of Research and Development. The workshop focused on assembling, programming, and deploying a monitoring system for rooftop runoff based on the EnviroDIY Monitoring Station design.

Shannon Hicks and the EPA team deploying the sensing-grading-recording system for rooftop runoff in Athens, Ga., in 2024.
Shannon Hicks and the EPA team deploying the sensing-grading-recording system for rooftop runoff in Athens, Georgia, in 2024.

The team at EPA conducted rigorous testing of the sensing-recording-grading (SRG) system over a six month period and concluded in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Water: “The low-cost TEST sensors used in the SRG system prototype performed well.”

The one recommendation of the study was that a missing data alert should be provided for early detection of missing data. Fortunately, that feature exists in Monitor My Watershed!

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