Department of Geosciences
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Browsing Department of Geosciences by Content Type "Poster"
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- Brokered Alignment of Long-Tailed Observations (BALTO) Applications in GeoscienceStamps, D. Sarah; Gallagher, James; Peckham, Scott; Sheehan, Anne; Potter, Nathan; Stoica, Maria; Njinju, Emmanuel A.; Fulker, David; Neumiller, Kodi; Easton, Zachary M.; White, Robin R.; Fuka, Daniel R. (2019-06-13)Driven by data-rich use cases that span geodesy, geodynamics, seismology, and ecohydrology, the BALTO project enables brokered access to diverse geoscience data, including data that have been collected/organized by individual scientists in novel or unusual forms, also known as “long-tail” datasets. In BALTO, “brokering” means Web services that match diverse data-usage needs with heterogeneous types of source-data. This matching addresses form and semantics, which includes protocols, data structures, encodings, units of measure, variable names, and sampling meshes. The BALTO broker employs an extensible hub-and-spoke architecture: its hub will combine well-established, open-source, data-as-service software (from OPeNDAP) with the Geoscience Standard Names (GSN) to establish canonical representations for brokered datasets; each spoke—called an accessor—comprises (source-specific) data-access software along with metadata mappings that yield GSN-compliant variable names.
- Brokered Alignment of Long-Tailed Observations (BALTO) Applications in GeoscienceStamps, D. Sarah; Gallagher, James; Peckham, Scott; Sheehan, Anne; Potter, Nathan; Stoica, Maria; Njinju, Emmanuel A.; Fulker, David; Neumiller, Kodi; Easton, Zachary M.; White, Robin R.; Fuka, Daniel R. (2019-07-17)The Internet of Things (IoT), interconnection of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, has given geo-data scientists access to quickly growing numbers of devices for sensing; at costs no longer requiring hardware grants to access. The BALTO project has realized the importance of these growing sensor networks and has been working to integrate these sensors that can be combined into sustainable and synergistic research and education programs, from K-16 through senior researchers, centered on real-time monitoring and analytics of coupled ecosystems. BALTO takes advantage of the OpenSource Long-Range communication protocol (LoRa) to connect sensors to EarthCube Architectures.
- DESIGN THINKING for Visualizing Acid-Base Chemistry - Documenting a user-centered approach for designing and developing an ADA compliant online tool for visualizing acid-base chemistryStamper, Michael J.; Briganti, Jonathan; Brown, Anne M.; Dietrich, Andrea M.; Godrej, Adil N.; Schreiber, Madeline E.; Walz, Anita R. (2019-07-17)This project created an online tool, that we call “The pkAnalyzer”. It enables the exploration of acid-conjugate base distributions in an easy to use Web interface. This project is also an example of the disciplines of Arts and Design into the STEM sciences, i.e. STEM to STEAM, and University Libraries commitment to faculty, students, and staff throughout the Virginia Tech system, in the areas of data visualization and design services to aid in the research process and communication of results. Beyond the functionality of the tool, this project involved the planning and designing a custom, modifiable, and attractive user interface (UI) and visualization that are "user-friendly", and incorporate the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and falls with the Federal Governement’s Section 508 guidelines pertaining to creating and maintaining information and communications technology (ICT) that is accessible to people with disabilities relating to vision. Using a "Design Thinking" approach, all aspects of the design of this tool – User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), Interaction Design (IxD), Graphic – were taken into account, and developed to enhance the user's experience using the tool, and undertanding of a complex chemical concept that is widely used in the basic and applied sciences and engineering.
- Development of the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences MEDL-CMCGlesener, G. (2016-12-12)In 2015 the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences took a leading role in increasing the level of support for Geoscience instructors by investing in the development of the Geosciences Modeling and Educational Demonstrations Laboratory Curriculum Materials Center (MEDL-CMC). The MEDL-CMC is an innovative curriculum materials center designed to foster new collaborative teaching and learning environments by providing hands-on physical models combined with education technology for instructors and outreach coordinators. The mission of the MEDL-CMC is to provide advanced curriculum material resources for the purpose of increasing and sustaining high impact instructional capacity in STEM education for both formal and informal learning environments. This presentation describes the development methods being used to implement the MEDL-CMC. Major development methods include: (1) adopting a project management system to support collaborations with stakeholders, (2) using a diversified funding approach to achieve financial sustainability and the ability to evolve with the educational needs of the community, and (3) establishing a broad collection of systems-based physical analog models and data collection tools to support integrated sciences such as the geosciences. Discussion will focus on how these methods are used for achieving organizational capacity in the MEDL-CMC and on their intended role in reducing instructor workload in planning both classroom activities and research grant broader impacts.
- Using Water Quality as a Proxy to Estimate Microplastic Concentrations in the New River, VA, via Sentinel 2Rodriguez Sequeira, Luisana; Allen, George H.; Gray, Austin D. (New River Symposium, 2024-04-12)Microplastics (<5mm), are pervasive in Earth’s environments, and rivers are a major transport pathway. Microplastic detection methods that rely on counting individual particles are time consuming and require laborious field collection, inhibiting real-time insights over large spatial extents, which are needed in order to better understand the issue. Satellite remote sensing has been used to estimate water quality in rivers with relatively high spatial and temporal coverage. Finding a correlation between water quality and microplastics could allow us to estimate microplastics in rivers via satellite imagery using water quality as a proxy. Though a handful of these assessments have been done, a wide-variety of study sites are needed to form a coherent model. We focused our study in the New River near Blacksburg, VA, and collected weekly water quality measurements and surface-water microplastic samples. We combined these in situ measurements with cotemporal remotely-sensed water quality index observations from Sentinel-2 to develop a model estimating microplastic concentration. We validated the model using in-situ spectrometry and water quality measurements. By providing more observations than what can be done with in situ sampling alone, we can improve large-scale microplastic analyses and modeling leading to better assessments of mismanaged plastic waste in Earth’s rivers.