Abstract

Background/Question/Methods In recent years, advances in sensor network technology have shown great potential to revolutionize environmental data collection. Still, these systems have remained the purview of the engineers and computer scientists who design them, rather than useful tools for the field scientists who need them. Today, there are many data logging options for basic data collection in the field, but scientists are still required to travel to their sites to collect data, and to manually import data into spreadsheets. Few end-to-end systems that can automatically collect and transfer data to a database in the lab exist, and these tend to be overly complex, usually only working with specific sensor hardware. We have designed and built a robust and flexible sensor network called Sensor Processing and Acquisition Network (SPAN). SPAN is hardware agnostic in that it uses commercially available hardware to create a turnkey solution for environmental observation systems. While developing SPAN, our goal was to create an end-to-end system that enabled data collection from various types of sensors in the field and provided a simple way to transfer those data in real-time to a database where they could be shared and analyzed.
Results/Conclusions We developed SPAN using extensible building blocks that can be integrated to meet specific scientific requirements. As an open-source and flexible data acquisition architecture, not tied to a particular sensor brand or application, SPAN works with several commonly used data loggers in conjunction with analog, digital, and complex sensors (eg imagers and robotic sensors). SPAN allows real-time …

Date

August 5, 2009

Authors

Fabio Silva, Eric A Graham, Annette DeSchon, Jui-Hung Chang, Young Cho, Philip W Rundel, Terry Benzel

Journal

The 94th ESA Annual Meeting