Life Under Your Feet -- Deployment Details
Deployment
 Atacama
 USDA
 SERC
 Cub Hill
 Olin II
 Jug Bay
 Leakin
 Olin I

Sensor deployment history and details

A high-level map of all our deployments.



Atacama

This deployment is located in the Atacama desert in Chile. Atacama is one of the highest, driest places on Earth. These sensors are co-located with the Atacama Cosmological Telescope. The goal of this deployment is to understand how the hardware survives in an extreme environment. In addition to the cold, dry climate, the desert is exposed to high UV radiation. These boxes are collecting soil temperature, soil moisture and soil CO2 data.
Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Atacama, Chile August 18, 2009 ongoing 3



USDA Beltsville Agriculture Research Center

This deployment is located in the fields of the farming system project at BARC . Soil temperature and moisture probes are placed at various locations of a corn-soybean-wheat rotation. The goal is to understand and explain soil heterogeneity and to provide background data for trace gase measurements.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Beltsville, MD July 23, 2009 ongoing 22



Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)

This deployment is located at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD. Data from this deployment is aimed at understanding the effect of forest age, leaf litter input, and earthworm abundance on soil carbon cycling. Two patches are deployed as part of this study. One of them is a mature forest and the other is a younger successional forest. These two patches are around 300m apart. They are connected using a set of relay nodes. A basestation is located at the foot of a tower located roughly half a kilometer from the SERC facilities. A long range radio link sends the data from the top of the tower to the SERC facility. Our sensor network technology provides high resolution soil temperature and moisture data to understand leaf litter decomposition, soil animal activity and soil respiration. The site also hosts 2 CO2 sensing locations that collect soil CO2 at 3 different depths every 10 minutes.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Edgewater, MD March 11, 2009 ongoing 37



Cub Hill

The Cub Hill deployment is located in an suburban residential area northeast of Baltimore. The site hosts a CO2 flux tower that collects ambient CO2 and meterological data. The goal of this study is to understand the effects of land use and land cover on soil conditions and to correlate measurements of soil conditions with the data obtained from the CO2 flux tower. The sensor network collects soil CO2, soil temperature, soil moisture, ambient temperature, and light. This is our largest deployment at the moment.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Parkville, MD July 29, 2008 ongoing 53



Olin-II (Johns Hopkins University)

This deployment is located in a forested area adjacent to Olin Hall on the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. Eighteen sensors in a grid formation monitor soil temperature and moisture, helping us answer questions about the activities of soil organisms. This deployment also serves as a development testbed where improvements are tested before they are propogated to our other remote sites.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

JHU (Homewood campus) July 13, 2008 ongoing 18



Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary

We monitored the soil temperature and soil moisture in the habitat which Eastern Box Turtles lay their eggs. These nests were located in the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary in Anne Arundel County, MD. The objective of the study was to monitor soil conditions during turtle egg incubation in different micro-habitats. The nesting conditions were studied at 11 different locations: three in 2007 and eight in 2008. During the winter of 2007-08, we also monitored the soil conditions under which turtles overwinter. We identified 10 overwintering locations and collected temperature and moisture data at those locations. This deployment was the first time we used our second generation hardware and software changes.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Anne Arundel Co., MD June 22, 2007 April 26, 2008 13 (I), 8(II)



Leakin Park

For our second deployment, we had several goals. First, we wanted to compare our sensor technology to the data collection protocol and equipment of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) . To achieve this, we deployed six sensors in Leakin Park, a permanent forest plot of BES. Second, we monitored background conditions for leaf litter decomposition experiments. Last, we wanted to study how much soil moisture and soil temperature vary over on a medium scale. This deployment provided us with some valuable lessons regarding the accuracy of the timestamps assigned to the collected data. We also learned some valuable lessons regarding the importance of collecting metadata for provenance purposes.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Leakin Park, Baltimore MD March 3, 2006 November 5, 2007 6



Olin-I (Johns Hopkins University)

This was our first deployment, designed to test our first generation motes. We collected data once per minute, for a total of 125 MB. The test data we collected here led to a new generation of soil moisture sensors, soil temperature sensors, hardware, software and storage designs. These lessons were applied to later deployments.

Deployment Details:
Location Start End Sampling Locations

Olin Hall JHU, Baltimore MD September 9, 2005 July 21, 2006 10