Dr. Brian R. Calder
Research Professor
Associate Director
UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping
Friday, March 13, 2026, 3:10pm
Chase 105
Abstract
The concept of volunteered information being added to the official nautical charting product (through mariner reports) has been around for almost as long as there have been official nautical charts. Modern low-cost electronics (for computing and sonars), better GNSS positioning, cheaper WiFi and cell communications, and ubiquitous cloud processing capacity has changed the scale of the opportunity, however: it is now possible for anyone with even basic equipment to provide measurements of depth, taken as part of their normal course of navigation, to provide volunteer observations (“crowdsourced bathymetry”) that can be used for a variety of purposes. Which brings a challenge: how do we collect, manage, and qualify this data? And for what purposes can it reliably be used?
The WIBL (Wireless Inexpensive Bathymetry Logger) project, begun in 2020 to address a need for a “minimum cost, minimal functionality” open source system to capture and manage volunteered bathymetric information, now provides open hardware and software to capture, curate, archive, and, increasingly, process this type of data. It is now used around the world to capture and curate volunteer data and has been the launching pad for a collaboration on data processing, and another of processing of volunteer data at scale.
This seminar presents the background and current design of the WIBL end-to-end system, some of the problems we found on the way, and how we’re trying to make collecting and owning your own data as widely available as possible. We also consider questions of observer qualification and data quality, whether it’s better to trust the hardware rather than the observer, and look forward to some projects on automated processing at scale and high-performance, low-cost data collection (with potential for collaboration).
Bio
Brian Calder started in electronic engineering but joined CCOM in 2000 and quickly saw the light, building data processing systems for bathymetric data, and for the estimation and use of uncertainty in all of its many forms, along the way. He’s spent a lot of time at sea over the years, much of it in the Arctic and Equatorial Pacific, but sadly still gets seasick on every trip.
