Miles Yoshida built a fibre-optic oxygen sensor for soil during a SURF summer
The fourth-year Environmental Sciences student worked with the Ecohydrology Research Group on a sensor read with a standard DSLR camera.
Miles Yoshida, a fourth-year Environmental Sciences student in the Water Science specialization, spent a summer developing and calibrating a fibre-optic oxygen sensor system for soil. The Faculty of Science’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fund backed the work, and he hopes to pursue graduate studies in water and environmental science.
He worked in the Ecohydrology Research Group in Earth and Environmental Sciences under Philippe Van Cappellen and Fereidoun Rezanezhad. The sensor uses fibre-optic cables coated with a platinum complex whose luminescence dims as oxygen rises, and he tracks changes in the emitted light with a standard DSLR camera.
Over the summer he refined the design and tested it at different temperatures and oxygen concentrations, then analyzed the data to compare the system’s performance with commercial oxygen sensors. Soil oxygen influences microbial activity, nutrient cycling and contaminant transport, which is why finer measurements matter.
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