Water quality monitoring program through the KduSTICK, a low-cost and Do-It-Yourself instrument connected by the Internet of Things

Monitoring water transparency provides an indicator of the environmental status of the water body. One parameter to estimate the water transparency is the light difuse attenuation coefcient (Kd). In the framework of the H2020 project MONOCLE (Multiscale Observation Networks for Optical monitoring of Coastal waters, Lakes and Estuaries), we have developed an improved version of the KdUINO (Bardaji et al., 2016) consisting of a moored instrument used to assess water transparency. This new version, the KduSTICK, estimates Kd near the surface in real-time following these specifcations: cost-efective, portable, real-time monitoring and easy to use with minimal training. This instrument transmits data by using the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In particular, our research group participates in the initiative “The Things Network” (TTN), an IoT network based on LoRaWAN. This device is easy to deploy and maintain, and it is suitable for citizen-science based water quality monitoring programs.