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From Seamonster

Welcome to the SEAMONSTER project wiki.

What's going on here and where are we and where is the data?
Vexcel Microservers: Sensor web nodes for harsh living conditions.. (status)
Microsoft environmental science article on SEAMONSTER

1 What Is SEAMONSTER?
2 Site Map
3 Seamonster Program Objectives
4 People, organizations, sponsorship
5 Seamonster Tentacles: Opportunities to Enhance and Grow
6 Wiki Mechanics

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 across the Juneau Icefield and into the nearby coastal marine environment.

It's been said that building and operating smart sensor webs for geoscience research requires three computer scientists for every ecologist. We would like something more like "1 to 20 to 12,000": Technology experts to scientists to secondary school students. Our educational objectives include scientist-teacher-student collaboration, fieldwork opportunities, extended 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: Notes, exposition, photographs, diagrams, source code, background, journal entries and more.

Seamonster Program Objectives

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.

People, organizations, sponsorship

SEAMONSTER is a joint venture between the University of Alaska Southeast (Matt Heavner, Principle Investigator) and Microsoft (Rob Fatland, Co-Investigator). The full cast of characters is here. The project is sponsored by NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology (ESTO/AIST) program and is also part of NOAA's Interdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology Cooperative Science Center.