Origins of the Project
At the end of 2019, the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire was asked to recommend a data logger that could be used to support the collection of volunteer bathymetric information (VBI) from ships of opportunity in remote and/or under-served parts of the world as part of the Seabed 2030 initiative. After surveying the market, we came to the conclusion that while there were some loggers that we could recommend, none of them were ideal. Either they didn't treat the data correctly, or they didn't come with any data infrastructure, or both. And they were all expensive enough that you couldn't effectively scale them to the hundreds or thousands of loggers required to really make a difference.
There had to be, we concluded, a better answer.
So we posed the question: what would the minimal cost, full-stack solution for volunteer bathymetry collection and processing look like? Minimal cost so that you could field large groups of loggers in a single place; and full-stack so that there would always be a route for data to be contributed to an archive for further processing, aggregation, and use. Ideally, we would also want the system to be clonable, in the sense that anyone who wanted to collect their own data (e.g., a marina, a yacht club, or a coastal management group) would be able to build (or obtain) their own loggers, collect and manage their own data, and still ensure that it went to the international archive in the right format. Critically, however: they need to be able to do this in a "frictionless" manner—the more we ask collectors to do, the less likely it is that we'll continue to get data over the long term.
The WIBL project aims to fill this need. By providing open source hardware and software, and designing the hardware segment to be as inexpensive to build as possible (order $10 [2023] per board in volume, although connectors and boxes can double this), the project lowers the barrier to participation, and enables scalable deployment of collection events without a central organization that could act as a bottleneck to expansion. Each collection event is formally indepent of the others, but still generates data in archive-ready format so that the data can be aggregated. This provides the opportunity to change the core question from "why should I?" to "why not?"