Enviro-net: From networks of ground-based sensor systems to a web platform for sensor data management

Abstract

Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis. © 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.