Duke Environmental Field Methods

The Boss and I ain’t talking about Bruce Springsteen 😎

Water sampling crew

Hey kids, having hotpot (at Hai Di Lao) is fun!

Having Hey Tea (the arguably most popular and one of theeee best milk tea shops in China) in Shanghai

Good Afternoon!

The team has been very busy over the past few weeks gathering last minute data, cleaning up data from before, and finding ways to show them graphically in the most effective manner. At the presentation hosted yesterday, the team was able to display findings for all three of our projects.

Below I have attached a graph that the "Air Quality & Respiratory Health" team has created. This section of the project consisted of placing low-cost PM2.5 air quality sensors in two indoor and one outdoor location in both Kunshan and Durham. After running them for a total of three days we plotted the averages overall for the residential, dining, and outdoor sensors. As you can the PM2.5 in Kunshan is around 4 times greater than that of Durham in some areas! We then used this data to assist us with results from our test with lung stress due to ambient air pollution.

We will be posting the rest of our graphs and final presentations soon! Stay tuned :)

-Akylah Cox

Learn more about our fieldwork and personal takeaways from our trip to Kunshan!

Spring Break 2018: Environmental Research at Duke Kunshan University A group of Duke students spent their spring break in Kunshan, China, experimenting with various methods of measuring air and water quality and learning about the region

Come to Hudson Hall 115A tomorrow afternoon at 3 pm to hear about the results of our research projects in Kunshan, China!

Emilia here!

Now that we are back in Durham, we have been hard at work analyzing data. The water quality team has also been sampling surface water around Durham: we have tested the Eno River, the Duke Gardens pond, and the Reclamation Pond on Duke's campus. We are seeing that for the most part, the surface water seems to be healthier in Durham than in China.

Our favorite test to do has been the coliform testing. We pipette 1 mL of the sample into a small petri dish, incubate it at 37 degrees Celsius for 24 hours, then read the results. Below are some results from three samples of a canal in Kunshan: a pink-purple dot indicates a colony of Klebsiella pneumoniae (a naturally occurring coliform) and a blue dot is E. coli (indicative of f***l waste). Looks very contaminated!

Hi there! The team is now on its final leg of flights back to RDU. We have had a remarkable spring break and an experience that we all know is unforgettable. Though our time in China seemed to go by so quickly we were able to get all our experiments completed and sift through some preliminary data. Before ending our trip we all went to explore the Bacheng and Suzhou water towns. Here are some pictures from the garden and lively streets! We look forward to sharing our final reports soon with you all. :)

-Akylah Cox

Hey everyone, Alex here, reporting in with a big surprise: the image analysis team working on image analysis! Here we have Alex Weck (myself) stitching together the images taken from the multiple lenses of the 200 megapixel array camera, and another student, Rachel Lau, working with the air filters to measure particulate matter concentrations. The team also put together an air sensor to attach to a drone using a custom 3D printed case, and used the drone's camera to detect the direction of maximum air pollution. Incorporated in real time, this would allow the drone to fly towards pollution sources and take PM measurements where the concentration is highest. The last part of the image analsysis project included setting up a GoPro camera to take a timelapse video of the skyline over the course of several hours each day, snapping one frame every 60 seconds. The group also has some of the preliminary data results to showcase here, although with just a few data sets included, the relationship isn't as robust as it will be after a few more iterations! Also included is a plot of the average percent error as a result of adding each image to the algorithm with its correspondence between image entropy or RMS intensity and particulate concentration - the evening out of the line indicates the optimal number of pictures where the predicted relationship stabilizes! Keep on the look out for our image analysis team final results, they won't disappoint.

Hey all, Emilia here!

As our China trip comes to a close, we are incredibly thankful for this opportunity as well as for all the people we have met. From professors, students, locals, etc., everyone has positively impacted our experience and made it possible.

A special shout out goes to Cindy and Bella, two native Chinese speakers whose translations and expertise were invaluable. Thank you for all of your help and for your patience with us!

Also notably, on Friday night we went out to dinner in downtown Kunshan with students from DKU. It was great getting to know them all - although we may have grown up in different places, we are bound by attending Duke universities! See the attached photo.

Hi, everyone! Rachael here. Today was our SECOND day in China, which we spent doing some morning experiments and exploring downtown Shanghai!

Here are a few photos from our adventures!

We started out our morning with our eNO walk to Duke Kunshan University! We then worked on our experiments a bit at DKU. After that, we took the high speed train (it was awesome) from Kunshan to Shanghai. The high speed train reaches up to 300 km/hour, which was pretty wild.

We spent the day in Shanghai exploring great food, great shops, and finishing off our day in the financial district and the Bund. So grateful for such a busy but insightful day — stay tuned to see what tomorrow holds for us!