What if you could drop an oceanography lab anywhere? Not just the instruments and equipment, but the expertise to maintain the equipment and train ocean knowledge seekers. What if you could deliver an instrumentation factory anywhere it is needed, so that people with the desire and need to study and understand the ocean had the skills and the capacity to maintain long-term oceanographic observations, independent of formal research institutions and operating on a budget that reflects the economic reality of those communities most directly impacted by climate change?
That’s the vision of COLaB, the Coastal Observation Lab in a Box, a program to address the critical lack of quality oceanographic data that exists for many coastal ocean regions, often due to lack of resources in island and rim nations. COLaB is collecting and assessing a variety of low cost and open source tools used for physical, chemical, and biological ocean sciences, with the goal of providing an al la carte collection of instruments from which knowledge seekers can build out a research kit. But beyond that, COLaB is developing training workshops and regional calibration and maintenance hubs so that the expertise to support, calibrate, and repair those tools remains with the community.
A CTD is a device that measures salinity, temperature, and depth (the C stands for conductivity, which, along with temperature and pressure can be used to calculate salinity). It is an essential tool used in almost all marine scientific research.
Summer is coming and it is time, once again, to roll out the next iteration of the OpenCTD workshop. Last year, thanks to support from the Open Science Hardware Foundation, we held a wildly successful documentation workshop, designed to revise and improve the construction manual and supporting documents for the OpenCTD. This ultimately led to the publication of The OpenCTD: A Low-Cost, Open-Source CTD for Collecting Baseline Oceanographic Data in Coastal Waters.
OpenCTDs being tested in the lab.
And that brings us to today, and the big question: What’s next? We’ve run several build-you-own CTD workshops. I am getting very good at teaching students of all ages (the youngest workshop we’ve run was with middle school students) how to build CTDs, but in order to make the program both sustainable and independent, we need to start training community leaders not just how to build, repair, and calibrate CTDs, but to run their own workshops.
This month, thanks to ongoing support for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, I’m heading up to Boston to trial the next iteration of the OpenCTD Capacity Building Workshop with Courageous Sailing, a Boston-based community sailing program that provides equitable access to sailing and ocean science programs in the greater Boston Area. Our goal this week is to lead Courageous staff through their first OpenCTD build, while focusing not just on how to build the instrument, but on how to lead others through the build process. Courageous will be set up with the tools an materials to build a flotilla of 4 additional OpenCTDs, which they can use to train more staff or as an in-depth STEM experience for their students.
And, of course, those CTDs are theirs to use in their ongoing ocean science and education programs.
I’m not exactly breaking new ground, here. Train-the-trainer workshops have become a stable of community-based conservation and we did something similar in Saipan with OpenROV several years ago, but this will be the first time I’m deploying a full mobile fabrication lab for the OpenCTD.
A mobile CTD factory, equipped to produce 6+ CTDs,
