industry
Nonprofit Environmental Advocacy
location
Brooklyn, NY
application
Stormwater management
hardware
NCD sensors Raspberry Pi
How The Gowanus Canal Conservancy uses Kosmos to empower local residents, advocate for policy changes and grants, and build a new framework for smart city projects.
Hear what the Gowanus Canal Conservancy has to say about the Kosmos IoT System.
Case Study Highlights
Measure
GCC and their network of volunteers are using Temboo's Kosmos IoT System to collect data on stormwater absorption rates in green infrastructure in their neighborhood.
Report
The data allows GCC to better pursue grant funding and improves their grant reporting.
Advocate
This information enables GCC and the local community to more effectively advocate for policy changes and better green infrastructure planning.
Empower
Finally, the project informs GCC’s volunteer network about environmental conditions in their community, empowering them to address global issues like climate change at a local scale.
city scene
A Vision for A Greener Gowanus
Back in 2006, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy was just a group of neighbors, looking to help clean up the area that they lived in.
Fast forward to 2019, and GCC is an established 501 (c)(3) nonprofit with support from prestigious institutions like The Rockefeller Foundation, Patagonia, and The Nature Conservancy.
Their activities include leading grassroots volunteer projects, educating students on environmental issues, and working with agencies, elected officials, and the community to advocate for, build, and maintain innovative green infrastructure around the Gowanus Canal.
"We spend a lot of our days advocating to city agencies, to private landowners, about how to make sure that their investments in the neighborhood actually serve the broader public," said Andrea Parker, Executive Director at GCC.
We spend a lot of our days advocating to city agencies, to private landowners, about how to make sure that their investments in the neighborhood actually serve the broader public.
Andrea Parker
Executive Director at GCC
Powered By and Empowering Volunteers
726
total volunteers
2,298
hours volunteered
3,000
trees mapped
The broader public Parker is referring to is on board with GCC's mission as well. The nonprofit boasts a network of over 700 local volunteers who logged over 2,298 hours of volunteer work in 2018 alone.
All those volunteer hours add up to dollars saved.
One crowd science study found that volunteers contributed to over 3,000 hours of work per month on average. To put a number on that, volunteer work saved $215,000 in labor on average per project.
Imagine how much more could be done, how many more communities could be served, if there were more projects that incorporated volunteers.
Aside from the financial benefits, giving volunteers access to the data can spur more engagement and advocacy for issues in a community. That was a big part of the goal when GCC and Temboo began working together.
A Shared Commitment to Sustainability
The project started when the team at Temboo met Amy Motzny, Watershed Manager at GCC, at an event for World Water Day in 2019.
From the beginning, it was clear that the two organizations have many values in common.
"GCC and Temboo share a mutual commitment to sustainability and community development initiatives and an interest in more effectively using technology to support these efforts," said Motzny. "We worked together to develop a scope of work that would support our organizational goals and help us secure additional funding for our projects and programs."
GCC and Temboo share a mutual commitment to sustainability and community development initiatives and an interest in more effectively using technology.
Amy Motzny
Watershed Manager at GCC
ease of use
Streamlined and effective data visualization, no coding required
functionality
Custom alerts, user permissions, top-notch security
customer support
All plans include top of the line support
over the air update capabilities
Change and update systems remotely
hardware interoperability
Works with many leading sensors
Why GCC chose Temboo
Motzny cites the ease of use, functionality, and customer support from the team at Temboo as the major draws for choosing Kosmos. "Temboo was incredibly responsive to our needs for a simple yet robust solution. Their team worked to ensure that access to the Kosmos platform was straightforward and useful."
Additionally, the prospect of expanding the project is made painless thanks to Kosmos' over the air update capabilities and hardware interoperability.
"The Kosmos platform gives us more flexibility to experiment in hopes of expanding and adapting our monitoring activities to the broader community and across our other programs," says Motzny.
The Challenge: Technical Constraints, Volunteer Integration, and Conflicting Goals
Previously, GCC worked on environmental monitoring projects in collaboration with academic institutions and city agencies. However, the technical constraints of those projects made community engagement and volunteer integration challenging.
So GCC needed to find a much easier way to collect environmental data that could scale based on their needs, and also allow volunteers to access, analyze, and understand that data in a meaningful way.
In short, they needed a whole new framework approach to solving local issues - one that was not top down and highly technical, but instead included neighbors, community organizations, technology, and government working together in a collaborative way.
The Solution:
No-Code Technology For All
We worked with the Conservancy to implement a stormwater absorption monitoring application using our Kosmos IoT Platform. The project simplifies data access and interpretation for GCC and their network of volunteers and eliminates the need for regular, manual inspections of the soil in the area.
"it's a simple and user friendly application that allows volunteers track soil moisture at any given moment and over time. Additionally, Kosmos sends notifications to volunteers during periods of saturation and drought, allowing them to be responsive in their stewardship activities," says Motzny.
Trisala Chandaria, Co-Founder and CEO of Temboo agrees, which is why accessibility was built into Kosmos from day one. "By democratizing access to this type of data, people with diverse backgrounds who are not necessarily technical or great at data interpretation can be part of a conversation that they are typically left out of,” said Chandaria.
Thanks to Temboo's no-code technology, creating and changing rules, alerts, and safe bounds was made easy for everyone involved in the project, including the volunteers.
Activism and Technology Working Hand in Hand
Soil moisture sensors send the data they collect to a Raspberry Pi gateway device that is hosted on the volunteers' home WiFi networks, which then passes it along to the Kosmos Cloud.
So the volunteers are a crucial factor for enabling this project to exist.
"Citizen science is important because it allows volunteers to have ownership over the data that they're collecting. Eventually, it becomes a process where they have more information to advocate for the issues in their neighborhood," says Natasia Sidarta, Program Manager at GCC.
"...this project in the Gowanus Tree Network allows volunteers to advocate for more tree beds, for more neighborhood beautification efforts, and, particularly, for stormwater management."
Citizen science is important because it allows volunteers to have ownership over the data that they're collecting.
Natasia Sidarta
Program Manager at GCC
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
and Collects CSO Too
The NYC Street Tree Map is the world's most accurate and detailed map of a city's street tree network.
So what does stormwater management have to do with it?

It all starts with combined sewage overflow, or CSO, as it's often referred to.

CSO occurs when raw sewage enters a waterway during heavy rainfall events. When sewer systems in an area can't handle the extra influx of water, they release their untreated contents into local waterways.

Here's a video that our colleague Briana took when she was in Gowanus one rainy evening:

Yuck!

But how does monitoring trees help with CSO?

One method of combating CSO is with green infrastructure, like those trees you see on the sidewalks in NYC. Apart from looking nice, these trees are great at collecting water during rain events.

"Street trees are more widely accepted by the community and much easier to permit and install than other forms of green infrastructure, such as right of way rain gardens and bioswales. Our intention for the monitoring solution was to identify criteria that would allow us to compare stormwater performance of tree pits to green infrastructure," Motzny told us.

Knowledge is Power
350 million
gallons of untreated sewage into canal each year
360,000
in environmental services from trees
14
combined sewage outfalls
Street tree monitoring has become an impetus for environmental action and behavioral change in the neighborhood. Trees in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn have a 112.5% higher rate of stewardship compared to the rest of New York City. The volunteers who are conducting the monitoring along with GCC have taken a personal stake in the project and are even planning on applying for a grant for a weather station to expand the scope of the application.
The satisfaction of being a part of a community project is made tangible for the residents, who can see the effects their efforts are having on reducing pollution in the neighborhood. In fact, the 3,000 street trees in the Gowanus Canal area provide $360,000 yearly in environmental services including energy savings, carbon dioxide capture, air quality improvement, rainwater capture, and aesthetic improvements. Collecting and reporting on this data allows GCC to advocate for more and better green infrastructure investment in the neighborhood to improve the area even further.
It all goes to show that when environmental information is accessible and easy to interpret, it can empower locals to better understand the areas that they live in, prompt civic engagement, and solve problems. Big changes, like improving air quality, often start small, with hyper-local efforts like this one.
In addition, this project takes into consideration NYC's Street Tree Map, the world's most accurate and detailed map of a city's street tree network. Since its launch in 2015, data on tree location, species, health, and more have been regularly updated by volunteers who share their tree care activities and the ecosystem benefits that each tree provides.
"The Gowanus pilot project with Temboo provides a great opportunity to leverage and expand upon this existing dataset," says Motzny.
Kosmos' predictive analysis capabilities, powered by machine learning, will soon be able to forecast future stormwater absorption rates and find correlations between readings. This will offer an even more robust set of data that can be used for GCC's mission.
"The Kosmos platform gives us more flexibility to experiment in hopes of expanding and adapting our monitoring activities to the broader community and across our other programs," says Motzny.
"GCC would recommend the Kosmos platform to other nonprofits trying to engage a broad volunteer network and use technology to support green infrastructure planning."
GCC would recommend the Kosmos platform to other nonprofits trying to engage a broad volunteer network and use technology to support green infrastructure planning.
Amy Motzny
Watershed Manager at GCC
Sense. Understand. Act.
IoT to better your  world.
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