Cornell University in Ithaca reports that a student-built methane sensor project aims to aid mangrove restoration efforts. In fall 2024, a team of students and faculty launched a project to create a device to measure methane from water bodies, a tool in the fight against climate change.

The unit needed did not exist. The goal was to help communities and researchers measure methane emissions accurately and protect water bodies. The device had to be low-cost, rugged, portable, deployable anywhere, robust to wind and rain, run on a light battery, and include a chamber that can fill with gases and then clear them quickly to enable new measurements.

“The real-world application of this was really motivating for me,” said Grace Lo ’24, M.Eng. ’25, who is now a computer engineer for IBM. “Knowing that people are going to actually put this out in a lake or out in a real mangrove forest inspired me to make this the best device I could produce within the time limit and the supplies I had. That challenges you in a way you don’t get just by doing projects isolated in a lab.”

Sixteen months later, in partnership with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), these sensors were deployed in Colombia for the first time, informing global greenhouse gas assessments and reforestation of mangroves — ecosystems that can store up to four times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforests.

In the future, the student-built methane sensor device could be used to study emissions from lakes, wetlands, dairy farm manure lagoons, abandoned gas wells and many other sources.

The student methane sensor development was supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. The Colombian mangrove research was supported through the collaborative research partnership between EDF and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability supported by the David and Patricia Atkinson Foundation.

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/04/student-built-methane-sensor-aids-mangrove-restoration-efforts.