Our group builds a variety of hardware and software tech for use in the field and lab: sensor-equipped drones, image analysis workflows, soil sampling tools, elevation measurement devices, and an Android app for collecting geocoded metadata among them. For 16S microbial soil samples we extract the DNA while still in-country (much easier to transport over International borders than soil) so we also depend on a variety of wet-lab biology equipment and reagents which we tote along. When working on ancient soil samples from archaeology sites we transport the samples back to campus, which has us organizing dry ice and fast shipping, where we can work with Heather Lerner in her aDNA lab. All of the tech projects we work on are a part of one or more of our three ongoing focus areas: finding the Norse, tracking climate change in the sub-arctic, and the Icelandic Field Studies EPIC program.
We will be documenting each of these projects on this site in the coming months.
- Drone hardware and software
- Image analysis workflows (archaeology and sustainability)
- Flight planning and craft management software
- 16S microbial analysis of soil samples
- Ancient DNA extraction and analysis
- Elevation measurement sensors (sub-meter accuracy)
- Field Day, Android app for collecting and managing geocoded metadata