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What Is SEAMONSTER?

The South East Alaska MOnitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research is a NASA-sponsored smart sensor web project designed to support collaborative environmental science with near-real-time recovery of environmental data. Initial geographic focus is the Lemon Creek watershed near Juneau Alaska with expansions planned onto the Juneau Icefield and into the coastal marine environment of the Alexander Archipelago and the Tongass National Forest.

From this website the interested reader can find

Building and operating smart sensor webs (at the moment) for geoscience research requires three computer scientists for every ecologist. We would like to change this to something like 1 to 20 to 12,000: Technology experts to scientists to secondary school students. This project has great potential as a learning and teaching tool both through its construction and in its future operation. Teaching objectives include scientist-teacher-student collaboration, fieldwork opportunities for both teachers and students, longer-term projects for dedicated students, and eventually--you can just imagine--an intuitive online virtual reality interface to coastal Southeast Alaska.

Site Map

These internal links connect to topic pages that link in turn to others with more detail. In all upwards of 280 pages of notes, exposition, photographs, diagrams, source code, background, journal entries and etcetera live here.

What's Going On Here?      Important links
People
Science   > Theory, Hydrology   
Geography > Natural History
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Logistics:  2008 Build      2008 Calendar
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Technical > Architecture
          > Sensors      > Sensor Details, iButtons
          > Motes        > Mote Details, Field Motes, TinyOS
          > Microservers > Vexcel Microservers, SLUGs, Comms, Eval
          > Power
          > Computers, Code, svn
          > Gizmos
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Data > Browser (mockup), Databases, Visualization, Gnomes
Web Services > GeoServer Gateway, GeoServer (wiki)
Microsoft 
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Education > NOAA ISET, Hoonah, 5th Grade Science Workshop
Monitoring
Telecommunications
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Facilities > Wiki
Schedule
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Future Projects > BASIN
Related Research
References
Terminology > Network, Peripheral, Markup
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Posters, Talks, Presentations

There is a Tlingit legend about a sea monster named Gunakadeit (Goo-na'-ka-date) who brought prosperity and good luck to a village in crisis, people starving in the home they made for themselves on the Southeast coast of Alaska. This Wiki describes a current-day technology program invoking such a 'benevolent sea monster' but rather than delivering fish and furs our seamonster will harvest geospatial data. By this we mean information about our environment that will enable us to better understand, appreciate and safeguard our home. These days we have expanded to a global culture where 'village' and 'home' mean the earth and our crisis is the question of what will happen to our climate (and thereby to us) in coming decades. (The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) reports and additional reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provide a current perspective on why this issue is real and pressing.) Seamonster will begin by focusing on a single watershed, a small piece of the puzzle, but will keep an eye on the broader picture.

• Address these scientific questions in the Lemon Creek watershed in Southeast Alaska.
• Build an expansible wireless sensor network infrastructure covering this watershed, ultimately to grow well beyond across the Juneau Icefield and the Southeast Alaska coastal marine environment.
• Implement query-based network operation: A network that intelligently responds to events within the watershed across platforms and sensors, further permitting investigators to remotely reconfigure the network behavior.
• Provide an easy means for scientists to recover large amounts of data from remote environments using wireless network architecture. This is to be done both in practice in Seamonster and as a well-documented exemplary model or template that can be used as a basis for similar work elsewhere.
• Provide students and educators with a unique learning opportunity: To help build the Seamonster network and understand the returning data streams.
• Place scientists in contact with educators and students in the classroom so that the purpose and science content of the Seamonster project will be accessible and meaningful for secondary through college-level learners.

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