2023-08-22: CARE: Coastal Adaptation and Resilience Education

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CARE program attendees with faculty mentors and graduate assistants.

CARE: Coastal Adaptation and Resilience Education was held in person from July 24 - July 28 at Old Dominion University. The Virginia Space Grant Consortium sponsored the event with faculty and student instructors from the Department of Computer Science, Political Science and Geography, and the School of Public Service at Old Dominion University. The camp mainly focused on how data science can help understand and improve water quality to enhance coastal resilience. The camp also familiarized the participants with the challenges faced by the cities in Hampton Roads due to coastal flooding.

The program was conducted by Dr. Sampath Jayarathna and Dr. Nirmala Karunatathna from Computer Science in collaboration with Dr. Wie Yusuf from the School of Public Service, and Dr. Tom Allen from Political Science and Geography. While Dr. Sampath Jayarathna provided knowledge on data science, other faculty members offered their expertise in water quality testing, experimenting, and other things. In addition, the program included coding sessions conducted by Yasith Jayawardana, Gavindya Jayawardena, Yasasi Abeysinghe, and Bhanuka Mahanama with support from David Calano from the WS-DL research group.

Dr. Sampath Jayarathna conducting a session on machine learning.
The program was held for five days, in which the first three days, students had coding sessions, including fundamentals of programming, numerical operations, data handling, visualizations, and basic machine learning. These sessions allowed students to familiarize themselves with widely used Python libraries in data science, such as NumPy, Pandas, Seaborn, and SciKit Learn. Further, they also got the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in a simple scientific workflow with Google Colab.
On the third day of the program, we had an outdoor session for data collection for a water quality testing study. The participants collected water samples from the university pond following procedures of a standard scientific experiment, such as preventing contamination of samples. Then they were tasked with determining water quality measures such as dissolved oxygen, acidity, and water temperature. The session provided them with valuable experience in challenges in data collection for an experiment.

Testing the water quality of the collected water samples from the university pond.

The following day, the students started gaining experience in geospatial data analysis and flooding. For this, Dr. Tom Allen hosted a lecture and an outdoor activity with sensors at ODU sailing center. Students were familiarized with the basics of operating principles of flood sensors and their usage in marine research, like in estimating ocean levels. Also, the students had a demo on hydrone, a marine autonomous vehicle capable of monitoring a marine environment.

On the program's final day, the students had another outdoor session participating in a beach cleanup program while learning about marine debris and human sensors. They also familiarized themselves with the concepts of crowdsourcing through mobile applications such as the Clean Swell app,  which allows monitoring marine waste on a broader scale. Following the outdoor activity, we had the program's final session to award certificates to the program attendees.


CARE program attendees receiving award certificates.

In conclusion, the CARE program focused on equipping participants with essential knowledge and skills needed to understand and improve water quality and to enhance coastal resilience. By integrating data science, water quality testing, geospatial analysis, and hands-on experiences like beach cleanups, the program fostered a holistic understanding of the challenges posed by coastal environments. Led by knowledgeable instructors, the program offered a learning experience, culminating in a certificate award ceremony.

- Bhanuka (@mahanama94), Gavindya (@Gavindya2)

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