The SCAPE Water Quality App project is led by Professor Dan Collins and was developed with the help educators, scientists, designers, and programmers at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, the Luminosity Lab at ASU, the Telluride Institute in Telluride, Colorado, the GIS Collective in Berlin, Germany, and the Green Map System in New York.
The SCAPE Water Quality App has been developed for educators, students, citizen scientists, and researchers engaged in water-monitoring and data-collection efforts. The App automatically determines user location, date, and time of day. It aids in the calculation of in-stream flow, provides a framework for water chemistry sampling, and equips the researcher with an easy-to-follow and richly illustrated guide for keying out and recording benthic macroinvertebrates and other biota. Once users log data in the field, they can export it directly from their personal devices to shared online databases for further study and comparative analysis with other users.
Of particular interest to Green Map making partners, we are working towards the integration of the App into the online data gathering and mapping pipeline established over the last few years on the Green Map Platform.
The vision: Data collected in the field, after appropriate vetting, will be linked to a pin on the Green Map’s global map. If a given user—in the Colorado River Basin, along the Hudson River, in the upper Amazon—chooses to do so, their data featuring particular water bodies would be linked to an international spatialized database supported by the Green Map platform. This data would in turn be made available to various research groups, government agencies, and communities in a collective effort to show the critical importance of water quality as we work together to address climate change.
The SCAPE Water Quality App provides the user with a tool for recording the majority of the physical (e.g., streamflow and turbidity), chemical (e.g., conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, nitrates) and biological indicators (including some 22 benthic macroinvertebrates) needed to determine water quality. The SCAPE Water Quality App is available for Apple (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and Android (phones and tablets) mobile devices via the Apple Store and Google Play.
SPECIAL FEATURES of the SCAPE App:
• FREE and Open source. Easy to download from both the Apple and Google Play Stores
• Works on both Apple (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and Android (phones and tablets)
• User location is shown on a live map and lat/long are automatically entered.
• Water quality is assessed using three different parameters—physical, chemical, and biological.
• A new camera feature allows unlimited photos to be captured and cataloged.
• An auto-calculated "biotic index" provides an indication of water quality from the numbers and kinds of macroinvertebrates collected.
• Nearly 100 photos and line drawings of macroinvertebrates in both their juvenile and adult forms are provided to aid in the identification of these biological indicators.
• Videos illustrate the characteristic behaviors of macroinvertebrates in their natural settings.
• The App supports export functions to standard databases in Google Sheets or Excel.
• Bluetooth-enabled wireless connectivity with standard water quality instruments.
