Objective 1: Habitat Sensor System
Develop Habitat Sensor System to automate the collection of environmental acoustics and telemeter the observations to remote servers over wireless networks.
Simultaneous observations made at different places can revolutionize the ability to compare acoustic diversity in different habitats. This is not readily achievable by human observers. Technology is not readily available to make timed measurements of acoustics and archive the observations with an appropriate time stamp. Thus, a Habitat Sensor Platform and an associated Habitat Server Platform has been designed and developed to accomplish this (Gage and Biswas 2005a). The Acoustic Sensor System is shown in Figure 1 below.
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Figure 1. The Habitat Sensor Platform a) hardware consisting of a Stargate processor, power supply, audio amplifier, microphone, wireless card, on-board storage, digital camera: and b) field configuration consisting of Habitat Sensor Platform, solar panel, 12v battery.
To provide an integrated system with habitat sensor platforms, networks, field servers, regioinal and national repository servers, and web-based client application modules for end users in a fully customizable manner, an acoustic sensor network system was developed (Figure 2). Once habitat Sensor platforms collected sensor observations from varying habitats, they transfer the sensor data to a remote habitat server via wireless networks by a web-based application able to automate the process of data trasmission and control the sensor configurations. The next tier of servers in the network structure comprises the regional repository servers. Processed and raw data from everal habitat servers are collected by a single regional repostiory server through either Satellite uplink or wired broadband connection.Finally, the regional servers can be connected at the national level server or can provide the sensor observations and analytical applications to end users.
Figure 2. Acoustic Sensor Network and System Architecture
Three clusters of Habitat Platforms, each with an associated Habitat Server, have been built and deployed to test the sensor system at the KBS-LTER. The Habitat Platforms collect acoustic observations at regular intervals and transmit audio recordings and camera images to the local Habitat Server. Each Habitat Server is designed to handle four or more Habitat Sensor Platforms. Each Sensor Platform transmits 2 MB of data during each transmission via wireless communication to the Habitat Server. A Web-Services Middleware Module was developed to manage the sensor data types, rates and communications (Gage and Biswas 2006). The programmable sample interval is currently set to sample at 30 minutes for 30 second duration. Thus, the Habitat Server receives approximately 100 MB of audio and image data during a days sensing from each Habitat Sensor Platform. Currently data are archived on the local Habitat Server and downloaded weekly and stored in a digital acoustic library on a Terabyte server (sonicinfos.ent.msu.edu) in the Computational Ecology Laboratory and Visualization Laboratory at Michigan State University. The location of Sensor Platform-Server clusters, is shown in Figure 3(a) and Habitat Server is shown in Figure3(b) in the Long Term Ecological Research project at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station.
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Figure 3. Location of Sensor Platform-Server clusters (a) and Habitat Server (b) in the Long Term Ecological Research project at the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station.
The Acosutic Sensor Systems are currently deployed and running at the following sites in real-time.
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