Near-Real Time Data Streaming from the Coweeta LTER Environmental Sensor Network

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The University of Georgia has been awarded a grant to upgrade the existing network of Coweeta LTER weather, streamflow and terrestrial microclimate sensors to transmit data wirelessly via satellite, cellular, radio or WLAN transmitters as appropriate to the setting of the sensor. Coweeta LTER field operations are based at the USFS Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, one of the oldest and best-known centers for forest ecosystem and hydrologic research in the world, while the network to be upgraded supports regional scale research across Southern Appalachia (http://coweeta.ecology.uga.edu/). Southern Appalachian forests are among the most biodiverse and productive in the temperate world, but they are also experiencing some of the most rapid exurban growth in the continental U.S. The current sensor network includes 30 stations at multiples sites along a west-to-east elevational, hydrologic and climatic gradient from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Mars Hill College (north of Asheville, NC), and a latitudinal gradient from the Duke Forest (Durham, NC) to the Whitehall Forest (Athens, GA).The upgrade of the regional Coweeta LTER sensor network for wireless transmission will reduce travel costs to retrieve data and to maintain and calibrate instruments. It will also reduce the expense of post-processing data and make it possible to publish data to a public website in near real-time. The upgrade will introduce uniformity in observational practices and equipment across the network thus creating diverse opportunities for increased collaboration with academic, local, state and federal agencies as well as local non-profit groups. Users would be able to link their own observations to the Coweeta LTER data to explore entirely new scales of interactions that include improving the capacity to manage the ecosystem services of water quantity, water quality, and biodiversity in southern Appalachia.