Main Page

• What is SEAMONSTER about? and where is it?
• Where's the data, what is the network status?
• Mendenhall Glacier terminus

.....

What Is SEAMONSTER?

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, starving in the home they made for themselves on the southeast coast of Alaska. This wiki describes a current-day technology program invoking another benevolent sea monster. Rather than delivering fish and furs this seamonster harvests data: Information about our environment that will enable us to better understand, appreciate and safeguard our home.

More concretely: The South East Alaska MOnitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research is a NASA-sponsored smart sensor web 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 has been said that building and operating smart sensor webs for geoscience research requires three computer scientists for every ecologist. Our objective is 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 and Wiki Structure

Within the SEAMONSTER wiki you will find notes, exposition (science and engineering), photographs, circuit diagrams, source code, background, journal entries and more. The wiki is theoretically structured as a pyramid with progresive levels of deeper as you dive down using the embedded links. In practice there is a lot of information here; but we have to confess it is scattered. Towards finding specific content the interested visitor is referred to the search utility on the left sidebar.

• Terrestrial Coastal Biogeochemistry Initiative
• SEAMONSTER Basics: What's Going On Here?
• Science
• People
• More links organized by topic, both internal and external
• Logistics > Communication
• Technical > Motes, Microservers (Eval), Power
• Software and Code, svn source control (external)
• Data
• Education
• Future Projects, Related Research, References, Annals
• Posters, Talks, Presentations, Terminology

Seamonster Program Objectives

• Address these scientific questions in Lemon Creek and Mendenhall watersheds in Southeast Alaska.
• Build a wireless sensor network infrastructure, ultimately to grow 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 to remotely reconfigure 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 an ongoing 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 was initially sponsored by NASA'sAdvanced Information Systems Technology (ESTO/AIST) program and is also part of NOAA'sInterdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology Cooperative Science Center.

Seamonster Tentacles: Opportunities to Enhance and Grow

• Getting involved
• Connecting with the global geospatial community
  • Virtual Globes.
  • A Virtual Earth interface to SEAMONSTER; see also theVirtual Earth map control software development site.
  • A Google Earth interface to SEAMONSTER; see also Google Earth.
  • NASA World Wind, the NASA Virtual Globe which includes some extraterrestrial planets.
• Education
• Virtual Reality
• Polar research sites in the northern hemisphere
• Ideas and Projects

Wiki Mechanics