The Village of Potsdam and its community partners have identified practical needs for more accessible observation of local water conditions, including expanded monitoring of the Raquette River at the Village water plant and water-level conditions near a beaver dam flagged by the Department of Public Works. These needs are technically approachable, yet they reveal a broader challenge: local students and residents need opportunities to understand what connected water-monitoring systems can measure, how environmental data should be interpreted, and how such information supports informed community water stewardship.
Building on an existing LoRaWAN platform created through prior project-based learning, this project uses the Raquette River as the community-facing context for an integrated education and outreach initiative. It combines Clarkson's water-resources and STEM education expertise, a long-standing K-12 outreach program serving ~200 economically marginal students across three counties, Talking Rivers' community engagement capacity, and project-connected (COIL) courses at Clarkson and FH Münster. Community-identified needs become authentic problem-based learning challenges through which university students develop additional sensors, LoRaWAN coverage, and public-facing data visualization.
The project advances economic development in New York State by building applied workforce skills in environmental sensing and data-enabled water observation, and by establishing an accessible LoRaWAN platform that the Village and other stakeholders can extend to further smart-community sensing applications. Water monitoring thus becomes a first visible use case for broader local innovation and an adoption pathway for commercializable sensor technologies, rather than an isolated installation, strengthening community-based water stewardship and a data-enabled innovation base in the North Country.