Adaptive Information Technologies for Long-term and Event-oriented Environmental Monitoring

Hannes Mollenhauer (Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung)

part of “Distinguished Lecturer Series”

The constantly accelerating and increasing impact on the environment such as climate and land use change are increasingly complex and represent critically growing challenges of global relevance. Therefore, one of the major challenges of modern environmental research is the establishment of an adequate environmental monitoring infrastructure. For the characterization of ecosystems it is necessary to detect individual processes with suitable monitoring strategies and methods. Due to the natural complexity of all environmental compartments, single point or temporally and spatially fixed measurements are mostly insufficient for an adequate representation. The application of mobile wireless sensor networks for soil and atmosphere sensing offers significant benefits, due to the simple adjustment of the sensor distribution, the sensor types and the sample rate to the local and regional test conditions. Following this approach of long-term and large-scale monitoring of abiotic parameters across scales the entire process, from data collection to data transmission, storage and quality assurance, must be adaptively implemented. To generate such an advanced data management system, a self-organized data transmission system and a generic and transferable semi- as well as full-automated procedures for quality management of abiotic data were derived. In this talk I will discuss our developed adaptive information technologies for long-term and event-oriented environmental monitoring by some field operation examples with an outlook on the application in future research infrastructures.