'Getting a Handle' on a Potent Climate Threat

Spending days camping in a mosquito-filled swamp on the Indonesian island of Borneo, Alison Hoyt's goal was to measure methane emissions in tropical wetlands – one of the largest sources of the potent greenhouse gas. Then a graduate student, Hoyt spent a lot of time installing and monitoring sensors in challenging field conditions. Specialized environmental methane sensors cost upwards of $30,000 and struggled with the extreme humidity. Now at Stanford, Hoyt and collaborators are working on a new approach to overcome these challenges: calibrating commercially available sensors to do the job at a fraction of the cost. Networks of these sensors could be left unattended in remote field sites to continuously monitor emissions.

“My experiences in the field really motivated me to find a better way to collect data,” Hoyt said. “Getting a handle on greenhouse gas emissions gets more urgent every day, and no one knows exactly why methane levels in the atmosphere keep rising.”

At Stanford, Hoyt found the perfect collaborators in Debbie Senesky, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics who develops sensors for extreme environments from airplane engines to the surface of Venus, and Jack Lamb, a PhD student with previous experience in low-cost sensor development. With funding from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Environmental Venture Projects grants program, their team is working to develop a network of low-cost autonomous sensors that can endure tropical environments while collecting real-time data about wetlands’ prodigious emissions of methane, a gas with global warming potential about 86 times as great as that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and at least 25 times as great a century after its release.

Read more at: Stanford University

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