Sensing a Changing World

International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote …, 2004

open, interconnected, intelligent and dynamic network of sensors that performs extensive spatialtemporal monitoring of our environment through coordinated work between multiple types and numbers of sensor networks. With the presence of cheaper, miniature and smart sensors; high-resolution remote sensing sensors; abundant fast and ubiquitous computing devices; wireless and mobile communication networks; and autonomous and intelligent software agents, the Sensor Web has become a clear technological trend in ...

Environmental monitoring faces a variety of complex technical and socio-political challenges, particularly in the urban context. Data sources may be available, but mostly not combinable because of lacking interoperability and deficient coordination due to monolithic and closed data infrastructures. In this work we present the real-time geoawareness approach that seeks to tackle these challenges with an open sensing infrastructure for monitoring applications. Our system makes extensive use of open (geospatial) standards throughout the entire process chain -from sensor data integration to analysis, and finally visualisation. Then, we show how the methodology can influence the city and its inhabitants by 'making the abstract real', in other words how pervasive environmental monitoring systems change urban social interactions, and which issues are related to establishing such systems.

ICDE Demo 2009

A sensor network data gathering and visualization infrastructure is demonstrated, comprising of Global Sensor Networks (GSN) middleware and Microsoft SensorMap. Users are invited to actively participate in the process of monitoring real-world deployments and can inspect measured data in the form of contour plots overlayed onto a high resolution map and a digital topographic model. Users can go back in time virtually to search for interesting events or simply to visualize the temporal dependencies of the data. The system is presented not only interesting and visually enticing for non-expert users but brings substantial benefits to environmental scientists. The easily Installed data acquisition components as well as the powerful data sharing and visualization platform opens up new ground in collaborative data gathering and interpretation in the spirit of Web 2.0 applications.

Acta Astronautica, 2003

2008

Environmental sensing is seen as key to understanding the physical processes that affect our lives. The collection of such data is used to enhance the decision making processes of governments, organizations and society as a whole in their future interactions with the planet. In order to be able to generate a global picture of the effects a physical phenomenon may have it is necessary to generate a framework which is capable of networking sensing devices on a global scale. This paper presents an initial overview of a framework to facilitate the worldwide networking of a wide variety of sensing device types into a Worldwide Sensor Web.

BioScience, 2009

Innovative uses of advanced sensors and sensor networks are starting to be translated into new ecological knowledge. These sensors are providing a new set of "eyes" through which researchers may observe the world in new ways, extend spatial and temporal scales of observation, more accurately estimate what cannot be observed, and, most important, obtain unexpected results or develop new paradigms. Automated sensors are widely deployed by members of the Organization of Biological Field Stations, yet some needs-particularly for chemical and biological sensors-are not currently being met. There are additional opportunities for developing sensor networks at synoptic, regional, continental, and global scales. Although we are seeing more uses of sensor systems and, in particular, sensor networks, the opportunities for these systems are just beginning to be realized, with much more work to be done, including formulation of new questions, development of new sensors, better software, and new ways for researchers to work together across large distances.

Roadsides, 2021

Introduction to Roadsides collection on sensory dimensions of infrastructure

This paper outlines a vision for community-driven sensing of our environment. At its core, community sensing is a dynamic new form of mobile geosensor network. We believe that community sensing networks, in order to be widely deployable and sustainable , need to follow utilitarian approaches towards sensing and data management. Current projects exploring community sensing have paid less attention to these underlying fundamental principles. We illustrate this vision through OpenSense – a large project that aims to explore community sensing driven by air pollution monitoring .

2009

Hydrologic instrumentation is undergoing a transformative shift in its ability to concurrently measure scales from centimeters to kilometers [eg, Selker et al., 2006]. To rapidly distribute and incorporate these advances in the Earth and hydrologic sciences, the US National Science Foundation's Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program launched in September 2009 a community-accessible instrument facility for distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and wireless networked environmental sensing.

2009

EARTH AND ENVIRONMENT 46 in weather and climate prediction is represented by land-atmosphere interaction processes. Second, the average effect of a patchy surface on the atmosphere can be very different from an effect that is calculated by averaging a particular ...

2012

Abstract The maturity of pervasive computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) enables the development of smart environments in many scenarios, including surveillance and environmental monitoring. Extensive research efforts are being undertaken in sensor perception, data capture, management and interpretation. Such developments are a prerequisite for paradigms such as pervasive sensing and crowd-sourcing services.

ACM SIGMOD Record, 2004

New Phytologist, 2009

Environmental sensor networks offer a powerful combination of distributed sensing capacity, realtime data visualization and analysis, and integration with adjacent networks and remote sensing data streams. These advances have become a reality as a combined result of the continuing miniaturization of electronics, the availability of large data storage and computational capacity, and the pervasive connectivity of the Internet. Environmental sensor networks have been established and large new networks are planned for monitoring multiple habitats at many different scales. Projects range in spatial scale from continental systems designed to measure global change and environmental stability to those involved with the monitoring of only a few meters of forest edge in fragmented landscapes. Temporal measurements have ranged from the evaluation of sunfleck dynamics at scales of seconds, to daily CO2 fluxes, to decadal shifts in temperatures. Aboveground sensor systems are partnered with subsurface soil measurement networks for physical eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. and biological activity, together with aquatic and riparian sensor networks to measure groundwater fluxes and nutrient dynamics. More recently, complex sensors, such as networked digital cameras and microphones, as well as newly emerging sensors, are being integrated into sensor networks for hierarchical methods of sensing that promise a further understanding of our ecological systems by revealing previously unobservable phenomena.

This paper presents a standardized workflow from integrating, processing and presenting real-time in-situ sensor measurements in the Nature conservation application domain. Especially the integration of environmental phenomena like weather phenomena like, temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. into automated, SOA based distributed geographic information architecture allows for contextual provision of new domain specific 'spatial knowledge" in understanding ongoing changes in an protected area like the National Park Berchtesgaden. Therefore the local climate measurements from weather stations in the national park area have been integrated via geo-enabled sensor networks utilizing OGC Sensor Web Enablement interface standards. New dynamic geographic knowledge can be derived when integrating, combining and presenting this real-time data with existing geographical layers mainly from hydrosphere lithosphere and biosphere domain. To achieve and verify this goal, a framework has been developed which utilizes recent OGC standardization achievements for sensor measurement integration and distributed geographical processing, analysis and visualization methods. Measured data from various sensor sources (text, database) are transformed on-the-fly into OGC Observations-& Measurements XML-structured data, accessible via a custom OGC Sensor Observation (OGC SOS) service. We present a workflow, modules and components which permit the near-real-time integration into GI systems.

2018

This research focuses on the development and integration of low-cost Mobile Urban Sensing Technologies (MUST) and immersive environmental data exploration mechanisms with the ambition to inform citizens about their environments and aid scientists in uncovering the relations between the surface attributes and the urban environment. We propose to use 3D immersive environmental visualization techniques to enable a user-centered interactive analysis and rationalization of the available urban environmental data in relation to further urban attributes. With this ambition, we have developed three mobile apps that explore three strategies of Augmented Reality (AR) 3D visualizations of urban environmental data. While some data could be acquired from urban Geographic Information System (GIS) and existing sensor networks, we also developed an urban sensing kit specifically designed for deployment on mobile platforms such as buses or cars.