text: 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.
  @cite_23: Wireless sensor networks can revolutionize soil ecology by providing measurements at temporal and spatial granularities previously impossible. This paper presents an experimental soil monitoring network that we developed and deployed in a Baltimore urban forest as a first step towards realizing this vision. Each network node measures soil moisture and temperature every minute and stores the measurements in local memory. Raw measurements are periodically retrieved by a sensor gateway and inserted to a database in which a calibrated version is also derived and stored. At a high level, this was a successful test deployment exposing high level variations of soil factors. However, we encountered a number of challenging technical problems: need for low-level programming at multiple levels, calibration across space and time, and cross-reference of measurements with external sources. These problems must be addressed before sensor networks can fulfill their potential as experimental instruments that can be deployed by scientists without major effort or cost.
summary: To the best of our knowledge, none of the deployment efforts reviewed here address the same scenario as ours: having (multi-year) long term deployments, based on cooperative efforts of several (heterogeneous) teams, using commercially available equipment from multiple manufacturers, with an integrated effort of data retrieval, quality control and data availability through an easy to use Web-based platform. We believe this is a more realistic scenario for ground-based environmental monitoring efforts. The current efforts within the Life Under Your Feet project ( http: lifeunderyourfeet.org ) @cite_23 are the closest to our own, also having long term, spatially distributed deployments with a Web-based data visualization interface integrated with geolocation information. However, they do not seem to deal with heterogeneous equipment and data formats, nor offer filtering aggregation options, derived datasets or quality information in their data management solution.