Harnessing the flow of ecological data across networks, middleware, and applications

Water is an essential resource, playing a vital role in almost all human activities. Water is also a scarce resource. Population growth, industrialization, and climate change pose significant threats, necessitating on real-time monitoring of water resources. Recent developments in wireless sensor networks have made such monitoring possible, but the networks pose numerous challenges when deployed heterogenously at watershed scales. We present the detailed architecture of Savannah River Macroscope, an end-to-end ecological monitoring system designed to support large scale research and management of water resources. The system architecture spans four layers: (i) a custom wireless sensing platform; (ii) a multi-tier sensing fabric based on WiFi, cellular, and mesh-networking technologies; (iii) real-time streaming middleware for the processing, annotation, and archival of sensor data; and (iv) front-end applications for the management and visualization of sensor observations and system health information. Unique among existing implementations is the emphasis on data semantics and system configurability. In this paper, we describe how the system meets the challenges of large-scale hydrological sensing, detail the system architecture, and evaluate its performance with respect to current deployments.