 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It's just past one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manila. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc, and today we have Dr. Brian Glazier, who is an Associate Professor in the University of Hawaii's Oceanography Department with us. And Brian, this is about the first interview I've conducted where I know virtually nothing about what the guest has. So we're here sort of talking about restoration of fishponds here in Hawaii, but you're a marine biogeochemist and you build a lot of instruments. So let's get the show started and tell me a little bit. What do you do? My favorite topic. Thank you for having me on the show today. This is going to be a lot of fun. We sit in buildings just across the quad, but now we get a chance to come down here and chat. That's right. This is a story that I get to tell my five-year-old daughter and hear her explain bits and pieces to my two-year-old son. Likewise, we integrate portions of it into graduate-level courses, so it's a lot of fun and it runs the gamut. In a nutshell, I'm interested in questions that span chemistry and how the chemistry of our planet and oceans interact with biology on a variety of different scales. Sometimes we make sacrifices and go into the basement and scratch a rusty pipe and try to understand that rust. Other times we get to use expensive ROVs, remote-operated vehicles, and go dive at Luihi at active volcanoes. And other times we get to be at more of a practical daily kind of interface in the coastal zone. And I believe you were on an earlier show where you actually talked about diving on Luihi, which is the next Hawaiian island. Exactly. It's a fantastic Luihi iron hydrothermal mountain just off of our big island. It's a great place. Sounds terrific, yes. I have to go and see it one day. But today, we're talking about sort of fishponds in Hawaii and how an oceanographer or a marine biogeochemist can actually help our community better restore and utilize these resources. So what do you do? Exactly. So some of the same fundamental basic science questions, dissolved oxygen, right? We all breathe. We're animals. You take away our oxygen or you take away our sugars, our candy bars. We are very uninteresting. We die, but other bacteria out there in the environment can use different kinds of things to breathe, whether it's nitrate or metals like rust. And they can use different kinds of sugars from different sources as well, sometimes not carbon like we eat at all, but something like reduced iron, which is in basalt rocks. And of course, this applies to the marine environment in general, not just fishponds. But I already mentioned the fishpond is a really good microcosm to actually do a series of studies where you can look at various changes over time. Is that why you focus? Exactly. And so in Hawaii, we have very few places that are estuaries, natural estuaries. And fishponds in coastal Hawaii are one an excellent spot like that. We typically have a river applying freshwater into a coastal walled estuary and mixing that freshwater with as tides come in and bring in saltwater from offshore. So there are these great dynamic mixing zones from zero salinity to 35 parts per thousand salinity. And along with that, we have various different nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus that all interact within the walls of that estuary, that fishpond. And of course, today, these fishponds in coastal Hawaii are under very significant and different challenges than they were four or 800 years ago when they were operating as functional fishponds and feeding and sustaining local communities. And so throughout Hawaii, we're fortunate to have a lot of different nonprofit groups that are dedicated to cultural and environmental restoration of these historic sites. And what folks like me do is come in and try to help to understand the biogeochemistry of how the systems work today. And perhaps some of our viewers on the mainland may not be familiar with fishponds. I mean, it's not in your backyard, right? So you brought along a picture of one of the more famous fishponds here in Hawaii. So this is the scale, right? Exactly. Down in the bottom right, we can see hundreds of people, right? And this is in Kaniwae Bay. This is in Kaniwae Bay in He'ea. This is He'ea Fishpond, which is about 800 years old. Native Hawaiian groups long time ago came out and by hand carried rocks out to build a wall. This one is 88 acres. It's one of the larger ones in the state, and it's also one of the more actively restored in the state. And this image came from when a hole in the wall from the 1960s floods broke through the wall and then that was all restored about two years ago or so. And so it's a, I love this picture a lot because it shows the scale and the scope of what we're looking at. This interface between a mangrove driven freshwater system on the left where a river comes in and coral reefs out on the right. And so if you're interested in freshwater systems, if you're interested in food supply, if you're interested in coral reefs, it's all right. And is this actually being used today, do locals grow fish in this fish pond or is it still being restored? Because the native Hawaiians before Western contact, this was one of their main sources of protein. Exactly, exactly. And so today the property is owned by Kamehameha Schools and a non-profit organization called Pipe Ohaea has for about 12 or 13 years been dedicated to the restoration of that system. And they have thousands of public visitors and school kids come through, learn not just about the ecosystem and the environmental resilience in these kinds of places but also the cultural resilience of cultural practices to make these work. And it's a great natural laboratory for us to come in and study some very fine scale chemistry and microbiology. Of course, the rub is that what we really want to do is understand the heterogeneity of these systems, how they differ from watershed to watershed on a single coast, but also why say the northern end of the pond, certain kinds of invasive lemur algae might come in and grow versus the southern end of the pond, maybe they don't. There's more endemic species. Now normally for these shows, I'll quiz the guest and say, well, what's the societal relevance? Clearly, this is supremely important not only for the health and well-being of the Hawaiian coastal environment, but the cultural and the historic perspective. So I think our viewers will recognize this is really important here in Hawaii, the work that you're doing. So what exactly do you do? It's great. And there is. There's this multi-generational knowledge that went into how these systems work. And most of these communities understand the system way better than I ever could as a scientist coming in with any expensive gear, except for quantifying and except for really understanding some of the differences in land use challenges that affect the system today very differently than it was in the past. And so that's how we come together with historical and cultural knowledge for how the system should work and some maybe outliers of why the system doesn't work today. And in some cases, there's a very obvious one. There's a sewage treatment plant. It's in the valve and you stop delivering nitrogen and phosphorus to this watershed. In other cases, it's much more complex. And it's the quantification, which I think you have specialized in. So you brought along to show the viewers a number of little widgets that you've been building. We did. And these sensors are developed in-house at Manoa. So what does some of them do if we can just look and focus the camera here in the foreground? So oftentimes, if you wanted to say measure tides at each one of the Makahaz or gates where seawater is coming in on rising tides in that wall in the fish pond, you'd go out and you'd spend $500 to $5,000 on an instrument. And you'd get data later when you came back and measured it. So what we've done is sourced the little chip here as a $9 sensor. And that's the chip that comes in most scuba diving computers on your wrist. And so it measures depth if you're moving or water column pressure if you're staying still. We've 3D printed a housing that allows us to seal this chip in epoxy, keep it waterproof, add a little layer of oil to keep the sensor clean, and then a filter membrane on top of that, which doesn't detract from the sensitivity. And then we can go out and deploy this on the floor of each one of those Makahaz, start to understand lags between tides at that location versus the nearest NOAA tide gauge or not tide buoy. And we can do it for much, much more inexpensively than commercial vendors. And the cost of this entire package you were saying is like $20? Exactly. So this sensor is $9, the chip we get on eBay direct from China for about $35. And it spits out communication through a cable to a device like this. And some of your viewers may recognize this. This is a Texas Instruments single board computer. It fits in your shirt pocket, costs less than $60, and it runs Linux. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a programmer. The light went off for me when I found a $35 computer, and I have some sensors lying around the lab that I say these must be able to work together. The other key here is this piece in the middle, which is from a company called Digi. It's called an XB, and it's like walkie-talkies for computers. So now if we have a computer on shore that's tied into Ethernet, and we have sensors out in the water, they're inexpensive enough to put lots of them out, using a walkie-talkie for computers. And being back without cellular data charges, without satellite transmission charges, all this data that we never had access to on that kind of spatial scale before. So you can get both real-time data as well as spatial coverage of this instrumentation, partly because the sensors themselves are so cheap, but also because technologies moved far enough along that you can just use regular internet. Exactly. Fantastic. Offscreen, you've got another more impressive looking instrument. Maybe you can bring that in first. So what we've done is we learned, the first rule of oceanography is if you want something to work, don't put it in the water. And we don't do that, of course. We take things and take electronics and put them underwater all the time, and sometimes they fail. The trick about this, the pressure sensor goes in the water, and so things will grow on it immediately and bio-foul, and eventually that sensor will die. I wanted something that was much more robust, set it and forget it, and we sourced from the robotics industry an ultrasonic sensor. And so this cone costs about $100, and it pings like a bat or a dolphin. And it's pinging sound waves to a surface. And so if that surface is here and it pings back, then it knows the distance to that surface. And what we've done is mounted these at various places around the coast in Hawaii, fish ponds are perfect examples, mount them where they're solid, and then allow the tide to come up and down below it and use this as an independent package. This one particular one has a cellular mode on it, so we can put that anywhere, where there may not be a base station with ethernet, and start to develop a network with increased spatial resolution between, say, NOAA tide gauges. And so how accurate are the NOAA tide measurements for the kind of environment you're trying to research? A fish pond obviously wouldn't have a NOAA tide gauge. Does it vary that much? Yeah, it's a great question. And so for a non-profit organization like Pipe Iohaea, they're organizing literally rock-moving, right, or sometimes collecting invasive lemurs, so they need to know exactly when low, low tide is and how long it's going to be at their site. Pipe Iohaea is lucky because the NOAA tide gauge is at Coconut Island, which is just a mile and a half away. And so there's a 45-minute or maybe a two-hour lag depending on moon phase. Now we can install these in their watershed. They can pull up a smartphone app and look exactly what the water level at each of the makahaz is. And once we accumulate enough historical data, we can then predict what that lag really is between the NOAA tide gauges network and what the local is. And tide gauges are just one of a variety of instruments which you've been developing. You mentioned dissolved oxygen or iron content. So you're trying to put together a complete picture of what, not just one fish pond, but fish ponds around all of the islands. Do you see a lot of variability between ponds? Yeah, it's a great question. And so we have been funded by the National Science Foundation to do this kind of sensor development within that coastal biogeochemical context in He'e'ea and in Kaneohe Bay. We just received funding this year to run a workshop. We had 50 participants last week come in from four different islands and 18 different groups to expand what we've done in He'e'ea out to other locations. And we've just received word that we'll be getting new funding from National Science Foundation for three years and $670,000 to continue this. So happy back in a year and we'll be able to answer what that variability looks like. In the second half of the show, I want to quiz you a bit more on this workshop. But we're getting close to the break now. But basically, you're still in the data collection mode, as I understand it. You're not providing advice that would change policy decisions or change cultural perspectives or anything like that. Yeah, not yet. Exactly. But that's the direction which you're heading in. It is. And obviously, as climate change and all of the urbanization is starting to affect our shorelines, presumably this is a really important thing that you're doing. Exactly. Okay, so we're about to take a break now, Brian. But let me just remind the viewers you are watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc. And my guest today is Dr. Brian Glazier, who's an associate professor in the Oceanography Department at Manoa. And we're talking, I guess, about restoring fish ponds, but also sensor development. And we'll be back in about a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. For every game day, assign a designated driver. Welcome to Hawaii. This is Prince Dykes, your host of The Prince of Investing. Coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m., right here on Think Tech Hawaii. Don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff. And I'll be your host. See you Tuesday. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc. And our guest today is Dr. Brian Glazier, who's an associate professor in the Oceanography Department at UH Manoa. And we're talking about the technology behind restoring fish ponds. But this, Brian, as you indicated in the first half, goes way beyond the kind of effort that just an individual faculty member at Manoa is involved in. And so you actually mentioned you'd held a workshop here quite recently. How important is this community? Immensely important and immensely enthusiastic about this kind of approach. It struck me in January, one of the things that the National Science Foundation does, in addition to funding basic research, is engages community and community building. And I saw a dear colleague later on, almost a solicitation for ideas for this kind of thing. It's called public participation and STEM research. And they host workshops. They fund workshops. And I said, this is perfect for this community. We have a community. A network is already there of close to 50 different traditional Hawaiian fish ponds that are in some state of restoration. So we have a community who is willing and enthusiastic about environmental restoration. And we have the ability now to lower the entry point, the barrier, the cost barrier for putting sensors in and getting them in the hands of folks who would otherwise not be able to afford them. So we wrote the proposal and NSF funded it. And last week we had Kamehameha Schools donated the property for us up in beautiful Punalu. We had 50 folks come together for two and a half days. 30 different participants from four islands at some of these traditional Hawaiian fish pond restoration groups. Most of the participants had never soldered wires together, were not coding, didn't know how to use Python. So these were anti-academics. Exactly. These were community senior members. Right, right. We had about 15 undergraduates, graduate students, and professors from UH Manoa. Oceanography, HIG, engineering. HIG is the Institute of Geophysics. Right, exactly. A couple of experts in things like sea level rise, the UH sea level center, I had a representative there, Phil Thompson. And we had mostly community members who understand their system better than we do, but not necessarily the basic science. And let's just take a look at some of these pictures which you brought along. And here, yes, this is a hands-on workshop, right? And training people to build these same projects. Exactly. I'm not an engineer. If I can do this, we can train folks how to do this. And so day one, we took a field trip to Heia to show these kinds of things in place. Let's slip on to the next slide. And then we went back to that. And we're looking at people out in the field. You're wearing these lovely green shorts. And basically, in the field, trying to understand the oceanographic or the marine environment. Exactly. And so we started off at Heia Fish Pond, which is a very comfortable environment for fish pond restoration folks, right? But not necessarily comfortable with the technology that we're bringing there. And so by blending these two things together, after the field trip in the morning, we went back to the site at Punalu. We'll see another slide, I think, maybe there. And so we- And here, we're back in the classroom, yes. Exactly. We would distribute the parts, distribute different kinds of sensors. This is a mechanical engineering undergraduate student explaining how we measure conductivity and how conductivity sensors work and how that gives us salinity. And so what I like to say is that the well-trained tongue can sense the difference in five parts per thousand. But you're not going to go lick the water every 10 minutes. And here, we have sensors that can do that for us. And salinity, of course, in a fish pond, may be really important, depending on what kind of fish species that you're trying to grow or they're relying on a lot of freshwater coming in off the land. Exactly. And it's not always as simple as a river source for fresh water. In some cases, there's submarine groundwater discharge. And all of this is going to be changing in the next 10, 15 years. Yeah, climate change is really going to have an impact, both with sea level-wise, but also, presumably, the evacuation from the fish pond as the temperature gets higher or we have different types of storms coming in. Exactly, exactly. So it was great fun. We had folks who were self-described, uncomfortable with electronics. We broke out into 18 different groups and assembled exactly what you see here in front of you. We designed the custom printed circuit board. I have an engineer in my lab who does that. So we knew that these could work. We had deployed them before. And we weren't sure if non-experts could really pull it off. And we did beautifully. These are all starting out there now in the field and all different islands. The proof of your efforts, whether or not other people are adopting the technology which they're developing, did they take away their instruments? We did. The beauty of this is that because with NSF backing, $50,000 for a workshop, we were able to give away 18 of these. And so right now, at home at each of these islands, folks are turning them on again and trying to get them out in the field at their sites. And so through fall, we'll work with them to make sure that there's any gotchas. We'll fix them. But there are 18 new sites, just like HAEA now, that have access to sites at a time. Is there any prospect that perhaps the general public, once all these instruments are calibrated and working effectively in the field, will those data become publicly available to an interested person? Yeah, absolutely. So right now, they're all streaming live on the web through my website at UH. And that's how we want to keep it, is open access free data available. And again, we're not trying to put companies out of business or replace NOAA because we're not, you know, we can't do that. We wouldn't want to. But what we do is we augment it. And so if you want to know why your road flooded this king tide and didn't flood last time, right, we're starting to piece together that spatial scale. We had people from Sea Grant College come in about two months ago to talk to us about the recent king tides, for example. And that, I think, shows the variety and the interconnectivity of research being conducted at UH Manoa where someone like yourself as an oceanographer then can start working with, say, Sea Grant, looking at king tides, law, looking at marine geochemistry, or looking at the aquatic life forms. Exactly. Very good. Very good. How did you get into this kind of work, though? Yeah. Boy. I looked you up on the internet and you came to UH Astrobiology Program, right? That's got nothing to do with Fishbone. Yeah. When I was four years old, I told my parents I wanted to be a marine biogelist. I couldn't pronounce it. I didn't know what it was. And I certainly didn't become a marine biologist. I'm an oceanographer. But I knew I wanted to do something in the oceans a long, long time. I came from an undergraduate degree in biology and then focused a little bit more on chemistry and my master's and PhD. I was working at deep sea hydrothermal vents. And it gets back to that fundamental understanding of how chemistry and how life work together. And I say it tongue in cheek a little bit, but literally the same processes that happen when you throw a nail in a bucket and watch it rust, that's the life that drives a buoy he. And a few billion years ago, much of our planet looked like the way he does today. And of course, the way he is an active submarine volcano, so high temperatures, you've got all these hydrothermal interactions. So that's why you're focusing in on the way he. Exactly. And when we take a breath, right, we're breathing oxygen and we're converting that, we're reducing that. And you know, if your high school chemistry professor would be very disappointed if you don't remember Leo says Gerr, right, loss of electron is oxidation and gain of electron is reduction. So that fundamental basic chemistry that we all learn in high school is what makes buoy he work, hydrothermal systems. So if there was a high school student, would you recommend to her that you actually pursue a career? Like is this an evolving and developing field in your business? Absolutely. This is going to explode. What the grand vision here is that for folks who like programming or electrical engineering, but don't really appreciate the environmental sciences, by doing this kind of sensor design for environmental sciences, we can trick them a little bit and get them interested in environmental sciences. For the folks who want to save the whales, but don't necessarily want to go be programmers or understand electrical engineering, we can trick them into learning something about tech and electrical engineering by saving a coastal environment. Perfect. And even though you're in the oceanography department, working right at the shore the land-water interface is perfectly reasonable land. So there's a whole variety of oceanography faculty at Manila doing equally exciting kinds of research, but this is really, really useful stuff. And I would imagine that, as we said earlier, with climate change taking on a greater importance here in the islands, we have to get some reference point, and that's what you're doing now before we start identifying what the consequences of additional sea level volumes or whatever it be. Exactly. And so something that Noah and NASA do very well, or understanding how tides move around the Pacific basin at very broad scales. But nobody lives offshore next to a buoy, right? They want to know their spatial scale, and so that's what we're trying to fill gaps with. Do you have any plans for a follow-on workshop? Is this going to be an annual event, or are you developing contacts with other investigators around the state? Absolutely. We're trying to... Well, I told all the participants, right, this is just the beginning, and so we've got 18 new nodes out there collecting custom data. I suspect that NSF would like to maybe fund this every year. That's my hope. Okay. And trying to find fish ponds at different stages in their maturity or degradation state. Exactly. Because presumably they were all productive before Western contact, right? Exactly. And trying to understand how did the Hawaiian community make them work? Exactly. It was really interesting. And do you work like with the Native Hawaiian Department School of Hawaiian Knowledge? Exactly. So we were working on a proposal for NSF to follow on this with the School of Hawaiian Knowledge. Okay. That's terrific. Well, Brian, I really want to thank you both for bringing in the instruments and for the discussion. As I said earlier, I know nothing about this. And I've lived in Hawaii 35 years, and clearly this is supremely important for our community as well as just basically preserving the resources which we have here. So thank you again for coming. Well, thanks for having me on the show. And maybe we'll get you back later on when you can talk about some of your other activities. Sure. Sure. Thank you. So let me just remind the viewers, you have been watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I've been your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark. And today's guest is Dr. Brian Glazier, who's an associate professor in the Oceanography Department at UH Manoa. So thanks for watching, and join us again next week if you can. Goodbye for now.