Environmental Sensor Applications at USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests: The Smart Forest Network.

The 21^st century is emerging as a time of great environmental change, including a rapidly changing climate, continued inputs of atmospheric pollutants, and current and projected shifts in demographics and how the land is used.  Together, these challenges threaten the health and sustainability of the nation’s great natural resources.  The demand for information to understand and monitor these environmental changes and to expeditiously communicate this information to stakeholders has never been greater.

Recent advances in environmental sensor technology, wireless communications, and software applications have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power multifunctional environmental sensors and sensor networks that can communicate environmental conditions to researchers, managers and the public in real time. This emerging technology generates information at unprecedented temporal and spatial scales, and offers transformational opportunities to better understand the physical, chemical and biological ‘pulse’ of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. 

Here, we present a roadmap, from the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station’s Smart Forests for the 21^st Century initiative, for how cyber technology and near real-time access to high resolution, high frequency data are revolutionizing our ‘business as usual’ approach to environmental monitoring and are providing new ‘windows on our watersheds’.  We will emphasize how this new approach provides us (i) access to data in near real time from remote locations and during extreme weather, (ii) tools to address existing research questions and develop new hypotheses, (iii)  novel opportunities for education and outreach, and (iv) a new era of networking long term research sites in space and time.