PC3: Collaborative Research: Wireless Sensor Networks for Protecting Wildlife and Humans

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This award provides funding for a collaborative project between Ohio State University, Cornell University, The Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore, the Wildlife Institute of India, and the Indian Institute of Information Technology - Allahabad. The dramatic dwindling of forests and concomitant escalation in human-wildlife conflicts are resulting in broad environmental impact, including large economic and social costs, increasing human deaths in areas used by large mammals, and animal population decline. This project enables a baseline operational wireless sensor network system for protection of animals, humans, and the forest. The forest setting involves complex scenes demanding the discrimination of several targets of interest in a highly cluttered setting as well as discrimination of their intent and behaviors. Activity patterns evolve in a naturally adversarial environment. The system architecture being developed integrates in a transformative way a suitably rich set of sensing modalities with intent inferencing, learning, optimization, and deployment techniques, to monitor a diverse set of targets. Mature system components are to be deployed in Panna, a tiger reserve in central India, in close cooperation with domain experts and forestry management. The project is a collaboration between researchers in the US and India who are substantially involved in complementary aspects of wildlife related research. A subsequent protection-centric effort in the US is envisioned that builds upon the lessons learned by this effort. Successful realization of system components and a baseline system would lead to an assessment of the potential benefits of using wireless sensor networks for protection related to forests and potential transition into production use. Over time, this will help establish credible early-warning systems, and monitoring protocols for animal use of human areas and human use of forest areas that can support recovery efforts. This project is part of the Pervasive Communications and Computing Collaboration (PC3) initiative.