2019 ESIP Summer Meeting

Session Overview
Sponsored by the ESIP EnviroSensing Cluster, this session is open to scientists, information managers, and technologists interested in the general topic of in-situ environmental sensing for science and management. Our community of practitioners promotes conversation around, and development and refinement of techniques to observe natural Earth system processes over short and long timescales. In this session, we will hear short talks on new data types, interesting technology applications, project case studies, data management, related software tools, quality control processes, and other advances in the field.

Session Agenda

1. Presenters: Scotty Strachan & Renée F. Brown, EnviroSensing Cluster Co-chairs
   Presentation Title: ESIP EnviroSensing Cluster & Session Introduction
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9275468
2. Invited Keynote: Joseph Bell, USGS
   Presentation Title: USGS Next Generation Water Observing System
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9275462
3. Presenter: Martha Apple, Montana Tech
   Presentation Title: Sensors in Snowy Alpine Environments: Part I, Microhabitats and Plant Functional Traits
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9275465
4. Presenter: James Gallagher, OPeNDAP
   Presentation Title: Sensors in Snowy Alpine Environments: Part II, Sensor Networks with LoRa - James Gallagher, OPeNDAP
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9275471
5. Presenter: Renée Brown, McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER
   Presentation Title: Environmental Data Acquisition from the Bottom of the Earth
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9389792
6. Presenter: Connor Scully-Allison, University of Nevada Reno
   Presentation Title: 5 in 10: A Practical Breakdown of 5 Frontend Libraries to Speed Up the Development of Interactive Visualizations
   Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8953652
7. Group discussion, Future Directions, and Closing Remarks

Session recording is here.

Session Take-Aways

1. Visualization Dashboards: Sensor users struggle with effective real-time visualization tools and data quality assessment pipelines. Network managers and scientists with deployments need effective dashboards. Viz libraries exist, but are not yet adapted into specific tools for our applications.
2. Telemetry & Emerging Tech (LoRa): Small-scale sensor users and geographically-dense applications are leveraging emerging low-power, long-distance radio technologies, such as LoRa. This radio technology and related network topologies are driving “open” networks for data transfer in near-real-time. The USGS is applying LoRa in the Next-Gen Water Network.
3. Sensor Metadata & Raw Data Archival: Software tools to capture uniform metadata for sensor deployments don’t exist. People at all scales are doing this manually or not at all, challenging FAIR Data practices. "Raw" sensor data are useful for science questions that leverage noise or unintended behavior. Documenting deployments and archiving raw data will improve workflows and allow use of sensor data in novel, unanticipated ways.