Award Data

Fog and smog reduce visibility at sea, greatly impacting ship navigation and safety. Low visibility marine conditions decrease speed and safety of commercial fleets and increase costs through poor fuel load planning. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of maritime operations to the supply chain; therefore, decreasing associated cost and risk are of the utmost importance. Applied Ocean ...

"Metron proposes to develop user-friendly software to promote understanding of impacts due to cascading climate hazards and extreme weather events, in collaboration with George Mason University (GMU). Climate and extreme weather (CEW) hazards pose significant risks to life and property. As extreme events become more prevalent, risks associated with cascading, compound events come to the fore, such ...

Maintaining healthy populations of salmon and trout (salmonids) has significant biological, cultural, and economic benefits. Significant data gaps exist for sources of mortality in juvenile and adult salmonids in small streams. These gaps can create discrepancies between main stem escapement counts and estimates of population health. Field Data Services, LLC is developing novel camera trap technol ...

Field Data Services (FDS) proposes a technical feasibility study of newly available solid state LiDAR sensor chips for detecting migrating anadromous fish in small spawning streams. The LiDAR chip, first introduced in October 2020, uses an invisible infrared laser to measure time-of-flight distances to nearby objects with millimeter accuracy. This tiny computer chip is breakthrough technology that ...

The pHyter is a handheld device that accurately measures pH using colorimetry, communicating with a cellphone via Bluetooth Low Energy. The app records location, time, temperature, pH and meta-data. In Phase I, we redesigned the instrument using an ‘internet of things’ development platform, modified the app to operate on both Android and iOS phones, and showed, through a network of partners, t ...

The primary objective of this project is to improve awareness, safety and enjoyment for mariners in coastal and inland waters by the creation of a participatory sensor network (PSN) that facilitates sharing of marine observations with other mariners. We are adding a new degree of temporal fidelity to nautical charts and maps. The approach leverages volunteered geographic information to augment con ...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) represent a significant problem for the Blue Economy, adversely affecting drinking water, commercial fisheries, water recreation, and tourism. Early detection of HABs is crucial in mitigating their effects. We propose to continue our development of HABSSED (Harmful Algal Bloom Surveillance by Sequencing of Environmental DNA) into the prototyping phase. The HABSSED pipel ...

NOAA SBIR topic 9.5 includes as a research priority the development of tools, platforms, … to make environmental information… more accessible, usable, understandable, and relatable to students, citizen scientists, and the public. Sunburst Sensors has twice used NOAA SBIR funding to successfully create new products. We propose using phase 1 funding to demonstrate the prototype pHyter as a tool ...

The primary objective of the proposed endeavor is to build a community-driven marine coastal data harvesting ecosystem that not only provides a benefit to the individuals within the coastal community, but also enhances the data quality, completeness and timeliness of maritime safety and navigation databases. The approach leverages volunteered geographic information to motivate dataset generation f ...

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) pose a significant and increasing risk, both to human health and to the Blue Economy. ‘Omics approaches to early detection promise to help mitigate these risks. We propose to develop HABSSED (HAB Surveillance by Sequencing of Environmental DNA) a portable, reliable, rapid, low-cost pipeline for detecting HABs in the field using 3rd generation sequencing with the Oxfor ...