It's Not Just Wireless: Networked Cyberinfrastructure for Sensing, Inference, and Control of Soil Moisture.

New applications are driving and informing the design of wireless sensor/actuator networks, and, more broadly, research in cyber-physical systems (CPS).  One CPS application domain of growing interest is ecological systems, motivated by the need to understand plant survival and growth as a function of genetics, environment, and climate change.  For this effort to be successful, we must be able to infer coupled, data-driven predictive models of plant growth dynamics in response to climate drivers such as plant water availability.  We are developing a system architecture and implementation for precise fine-scale data- and model-driven control of irrigation in an array of geographically-distributed outdoor gardens on an elevation gradient of over 1000 m, allowing design of experiments that combine control of temperature and soil moisture.  This talk describes key aspects of this cyber-eco system, including wireless sensor/actuator node design, site-level wireless networking, data assimilation, inference, distributed control, data management, and visualization.  Among its innovations are a modular, parallel-processing wireless sensor/actuator node hardware design allowing real-time processing and heterogeneous nodes. In this talk I will also outline our implementation of the architecture and summarize initial results from its development and deployment.