HR: 09:30h
AN: B51F-07    [Abstracts]
TI: The Use of Wireless Sensor Networks in Soil Ecology
AU: * Szlavecz, K
EM: szlavecz@jhu.edu
AF: The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21210
AU: Szalay, A S
EM: szlavecz@jhu.edu
AF: The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21210
AU: Hong, W
EM: wei.hong@intel.com
AF: Intel Research Berkeley, 2150 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704
AU: Wertheimer, D
EM: danw@ssl.ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
AB: The availability of inexpensive, low power wireless sensors is changing the way we can acquire environmental information. This type of monitoring is especially necessary in systems, where conditions vary at different spatial and temporal scales. The most spatially complex stratum of a terrestrial ecosystem is its soil. Soil harbors an enormous variety of plants, microorganisms, invertebrates and vertebrates which provide numerous ecosystem services, such as decomposition of organic matter, soil aeration, modification of pore and aggregate size. We still poorly understand how biodiversity, abundance and functioning of the soil system are linked together. Our understanding of soil organism dynamics and, more importantly the role these organisms play in important ecosystem processes is limited due to the complexity of this environments and lack of continuously collected abiotic data. In particular, spatial and temporal variations in the environmental factors over mezoscopic (1-10m) distances is important to the distribution and behavior of soil invertebrates, to their role in litter and nutrient dynamics, and to soil nutrient processing. This presentation focuses on how low-cost wireless networks can be assembled and customized to augment several ongoing soil ecological studies in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, and urban LTER site. A relatively modest configuration of a few hundred sensors will collect close to 100 million data points over a year. The projects range from neighborhood scale assessment of soil communities to reproductive biology of invasive soil invertebrates and to a detailed study of the enormous spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the soil substrate.
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting