Eric Graham Nathan YauStaff Ecologist, CENS Graduate Student, Department of Statistics

Use Cases SensorBase

Coupled Human-Observational Systems

Technology Drivers

Coupled Human-Observational Systems refers to interactions between experimenters and a wide range of observational resources.

The process of drawing inferences about environmental phenomena feeds back to affect how observing systems operate.

– ECHOS

By repeatedly deploying sensing systems in field experiments, we are finding that to answer many scientific questions, a tight collaboration between environmental researchers, computer scientists, and engineers is required.

Technology Drivers

Use Case: La Selva Biological Station

Sharp transitions from primary forest to open areas provide a means of understanding the ecological effects of rainforest fragmentation.

What to measure?Where to measure?How to measure it?At what scale?At what frequency?At what resolution?

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Use Case: La Selva Biological Station

A rapidly deployable NIMS array can be used to characterize environmental conditions at multiple sites, frequencies, and resolutions.

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Use Case: La Selva Biological Station

“To understand NIMS, one must first become NIMS.” – Yeung Lam

http://interactive.cens.ucla.edu/LaSelva/LaSelva1.html

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Use Case: La Selva Biological Station

Transect length determined scale, frequency, and resolution: Forest site complexity limited the length of a support cable.

At what scale?

At what frequency?

At what resolution?

Solution: Easily-manipulated file-base interface for customizing NIMS movements to the specific conditions of the site.

Flexible, easy-to-use, easy-to-adapt.

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Relativelight

Clearing

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Clearing

Use Case: La Selva, Costa Rica

Use Case: AMARSS, James Reserve

Soil CO2 fluxes occur at predictable soil moisture and temperature values, but become spatially and temporally complex depending on the local characteristics of the forest overstory.

Use Case: AMARSS

Use Case: AMARSS, James Reserve

Arrays of imagers, below- and above-ground fixed sensors, and above-ground actuated sensors are used as inputs to drive temporal flux models… which in turn refine the sensor locations and sampling frequency.

AMARSS, James Reserve

Use Case: AMARSS, James Reserve

Example of spatial and temporal complexity:

All ten CO2 nodes have a diurnal pattern, but each has a different maximum flux, peak time, and strength of pattern.

AMARSS, James Reserve

Use Case: AMARSS, James Reserve

Rain, soil water content, and temperature all affect soil CO2 production.

However, fungal rhizomorphs (captured from images) complicate the picture.

AMARSS, James Reserve

Forest site complexity requires inputs from many types of sensors and a platform for the integration of data.

At what scale?

At what frequency?

At what resolution?

Solution: Continuous measurement streams from the microclimate, soil arrays, and imagers feed data archives: SensorBase.

Standardized input to facilitate collaboration, and data sharing among researchers.

AMARSS, James Reserve

Use Case: AMARSS, James Reserve

• Similar to blogging sites, SensorBase.org is a slogging site that allows users to log sensor data in a specified XML format.

• Blog user interfaces (e.g. Blogger, WordPress) are very user-friendly; users can publish, delete, and set permissions on entries with little effort. We wish to create a similar interface and backend for slogging.

• Blog entries can be categorized and RSS is generated on the fly for easy notification and syndication.

SensorBase Overview

SensorBase alpha

SensorBase User Interface

Web interface for SensorBase:

• Search for data

• Slog data

• Create and manage projects

http://sensorbase.org/alpha/

User Interface: Slog Data

Users can slog CSV, XML, images, videos, and sound via the interface. Data can also be slogged program-matically.

Once data is slogged, users can easily make their data available via the interface or SOAP.

This allows easy data-sharing and makes it easy to build applications on top of SensorBase.

RSS Notifications

When data is slogged to SensorBase, a user-defined RSS feed will be updated so that users can be updated with the status of a sensor or alerted when something is not right.

Here we have an RSS feed updated with a plot and summary statistics produced by R.

User Interface: Find Data

Live Image Feeds

Once data becomes available in a centralized repository, we have quite a few options for analysis.

Open for Interpretation

Future of SensorBase

In the Works

• Alerts for automatic notification of events, such as sensor failures or trends in the data.

• Increased options for searching through data that demonstrate trends or characteristics.

• Increased capabilities for visualization of data, including mapping and tools for exploratory analysis.

• Creating more user-built applications on top of SensorBase.