If a tree falls in the forest of the future, something is bound to hear it and know why.
California Connected visits the James Reserve field research station in the San Jacinto Mountains, where a network of robots and sensors developed by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing monitor the forest’s vital signs, such as temperature, humidity and who’s living there.
These eyes and ears of the forest are everywhere, from high in the tree-top canopy to below ground and even in the middle of lakes.
Moreover, this is just the beginning. Continental-scale observation networks are already in the planning stages. Others are planned for large swaths of the ocean floor. Much like a medical MRI of the body, these embedded networks can give a super detailed analysis of what’s happening in any ecosystem.
An earlier version of this story first aired September 23, 2005.
- Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), “an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional venture involving hundreds of faculty, engineers, graduate student researchers, and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines at the partner institutions of University of California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of California Riverside, California Institute of Technology, University of California at Merced, and California State University at Los Angeles.”
- James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve, site of the CENS experiement in Terrestrial Ecology Observing Systems. The James Reserve also hosts various webcams.
- National Ecological Observatory Network, will be “the first national ecological measurement and observation system designed both to answer regional [and] continental-scale scientific questions…to achieve credible ecological forecasting and prediction.”
- NEPTUNE, “a fiber optic cable to inner space,” is an oceanographic and geophysical monitoring network planned off the Pacific Northwest coast, along the seismically active Juan de Fuca plate.
- The Real-time Ecological Monitoring Observatory (REMO), at San Diego State University’s Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve, is similar to the CENS project at James Reserve, and is located on the Riverside/San Diego County line, between Temecula and Fallbrook.