Many urban waterbodies are impaired due to exports of nutrients, pesticides, sewage, and sediments, preventing them from serving as a safe habitat. Concentrations of the pollutants can be very dynamic during rainfall-runoff events, particularly during the “first flush”, and cannot be comprehensively captured using traditional low-frequency, stationary water quality (WQ) sampling and monitoring. Various commercial WQ monitoring platforms are available; however, they are often cost-prohibitive for Water Resources Managers (WRMs). GatorByte addresses this gap by providing a low-cost and open-source, spatiotemporal real-time WQ monitoring. The GatorByte buoy is a 3d-printed buoyant device that moves with flowing water and reports pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, electroconductivity, and GPS coordinates in real-time via cellular service. GatorByte can be deployed as either an untethered buoy or a station in either creeks, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes or estuaries; potentially enabling integration of spatial (buoy) and temporal (station) WQ monitoring. GatorByte successfully performed trial surveys – as a station in a pond located at the Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants and as a buoy in Sweetwater Branch creek in Gainesville, FL – establishing its ability to monitor WQ reliably and effectively. Hydrolab HL4 sonde was used as a reference sensor at Sweetwater Branch. The survey data was visualized on the GatorByte dashboard, which showed the variation of WQ over the duration of the surveys. In the future, GatorByte will be used to perform surveys at lakes and rivers in Florida to characterize the WQ and study the spatiotemporal variations caused by rain and merging tributaries.
