Environmental Monitoring for Lab Animal Facilities
Summary
Temperature, humidity, light cycles, and air quality directly affect animal health and research reproducibility. Most facilities log these manually, a clipboard on the wall, a spreadsheet someone updates on Friday afternoon. Colony.care brings environmental monitoring into the same platform that tracks the animals, with configurable thresholds and automatic alerts when parameters drift.
What to Monitor
At minimum: temperature, humidity, and light cycle per room. For aquatic species: water temperature, pH, conductivity, ammonia, nitrate. For avian: light cycle is critical for breeding. Colony.care lets you configure monitoring parameters by room, rack, or tank, with species-appropriate threshold ranges.
Threshold Alerts
Set acceptable ranges for each parameter. When a reading falls outside the range, Colony.care logs the excursion and can notify staff by email or dashboard alert. This replaces the "someone noticed on Monday that the temperature was high on Saturday" failure mode with same-day awareness.
FAQ
Does Colony.care integrate with building management systems?
Environmental readings are entered manually or imported via CSV. Direct integration with BMS/EMS systems is on the roadmap. The REST API can be used to push readings from external monitoring systems into Colony.care.