The NSF transmitted its final approval
for the 3 year, $1,029,000 'continuing' Grant Award ANI-9909218
to Old Colorado City Communications, with David Hughes Principal
Investigator, on September 14th, 1999. The work is to start on September
15th, and the first year's work will officially be over on August
31st, 2000.
The Project is officially named,
by the NSF, as " "Prototype Testing and Evaluation of Wireless Instrumentation
for Ecolgical Research at Remote Field Locations." We will use the
term 'Biological Research by Wireless' for short.
The details of the Purpose, Scope,
Plan of Work of this Project is accessible from the top page of
http://wireless.oldcolo.com
The final approval was not made
when the PI requested it, so the project is starting 45 days later
than requested. This will largely affect the first winter's work,
for the lakes in Northern Wisconsin will start freezing over in
November. There may not enough time to research, design, fabricate,
deploy and installed the first wireless system out on a lake, as
requested by Tim Kratz, PI for the Trout Lake research site. But
we can ask for time extensions at the other end of the project time,
if needed to complete work.
Organization
Work has started on a revision
of the original wireless.oldcolo.com web site which carried both
running and final reports for the previous award "Wireless Field
Tests for Education" projects through March 1st, 1999, when it was
over.
The revision to the web site will
present this Biological Sciences by Wireless project from the home
page of http://wireless.oldcolo.com.
The earlier project web presentations will be accessible from the
home page of this one. No data will be lost.
The site will be well illustrated
by graphical maps, photographs, and diagramatical information, as
well as numerous links to the Biological Research Project area's
web sites which are being served by this wireless project.
Collaboration
This wireless project is designed
to support working biologists in the field. Thus this Award, made
from the Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR)
Division of the NSF, is coordinated with the Biological Sciences
Directorate, which funds and supports over 1,200 researchers engaged
in fundemental research out of 21 Long Term Ecological Research
(LTER) sites. It was at the suggestion of BSD that the initial sites
they would like to be supported wirelessly, are:
1. Wisconsin North Temperate Lakes
LTER - at Trout Lake, Wisconsin, affiliated with University of Wisconsin
at Madison, and its Center for Limnology. Tim Katz at Trout Lake
is the PI there. 2. Puerto Rican Tropical Rainforest Luquillo LTER
- at the Luqillo National Forest, PR. Affiliated with the University
of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Forest Service. Jess Zimmerman in Puerto
Rico is the PI.
Thus the initial effort to link
up field sensors wirelessly will be at these two LTERs, representing
an enviornmental paranthesis bracketting extremes of weather and
environment that other LTERS face.
All the LTERs are linked to both
an overall, and individual web sites, most operating supported at
the main university affiliated with the site. The over all web site
is http://lternet.edu.
From this site all other sites can be reached.
The Trout Lake and Madison Lakes
LTER can be reached at http://limnosun.limnology.wisc.edu/
The Luquillo Experimental Forest
LTER can be reached at http://sunceer.upr.clu.edu
Organization for Work
This PI (Dave Hughes) has already,
before this grant was awarded, and at his own expense, visited both
Trout Lake, Wisconsin, and the Luquillo Forest in Puerto Rico to
meet with the PIs, get familiar with the work they do there, and
what kind of data collection would they like us to connect up wirelessly
first. This was reflected in the Project Plan on this web site http://wireless.oldcolo.com/plan.htm
But as planned for in the work
plan, an early task will be to visit the primary company which supplies
data loggers (battery powered, sensor interfaces, with memory modules)
to Trout Lake and Luqillo - Campbell Scientific, Logan, Utah. To
get operational information on how their devices work, their port
interfaces, and the file format data produced by the software that
reads and records their data.
That trip will be taken in October,
after a trip to Cameno Island, Puget Sound, Washington, where initial
work will be planned with Steve Roberts of Nomad Research Labs,
for him to make and deliver the prototype of a miniaturized mobile
environmental data and communications device.
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