OVERVIEW

The first two generations of the NIMS field systems have been created, deployed, and tested. The first generation NIMS node has been successfully temporarily deployed at the Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility in Washington State. The second generation node has been deployed since the end of March, 2004, continuously operating since.

Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility Deployment

The first generation NIMS node was temporarily deployed at the Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility in Washington State in September, 2003. A diagram of that deployment is shown in figure 1.

This deployment consisted of a NIMS node suspended between the canopies of two trees. A vertically suspended Met Node, containing sensors for temperature, humidity, and PAR(light intensity) was attached to the horizontal moving NIMS node, allowing two degrees of freedom for motion. An imager with pan and tilt actuators was included on the lower side of the horizontally moving Node. The nodes communicated with each other over a wireless interface and to a gateway located in the crane site dry shack. This gateway connected through the internet to a server at UCLA. Solar panels located on the cable harvest energy, storing excess energy in a battery bank located on the forest floor. A power distribution cable distributes power to the NIMS node for continuous operation.

Figure 2. (a)NIMS deployed at the WRCCRF (b) The Canopy Crane at Wind River

Figure 2a shows a picture of NIMS node deployed at the Wind River deployment site. Figure 2b shows a picture of the crane used at the site. Several static Met sensors are located along the height of the crane tower. Sensor data has been verified as the meteorological data acquired on the NIMS node correlated closely to the data collected from the static sensors on the crane tower.

James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve

A second generation NIMS node has been created and has been deployed in the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve near Idyllwild, California, since the end of March, 2004. Figure 3 shows pictures of this node. This NIMS node shares similar capabilities as the first generation prototype node, however, it is designed to withstand all types of weather expected in the deployment region. Since deployment, the node has endured rain, snow, and intense sun exposure, operating almost continuously through each of these weather patterns.

The node also contains a pan, tilt, and zoom visible spectrum imager. This is currently being used in phenology experiments taking place at the James Reserve to optically monitor plant growth at different areas of the transect. Figure 4 shows example images of the plants at The James Reserve.

Figure 3. Second Generation NIMS node deployed in The James Reserve

Figure 4. Closeup images of plants for a phenology experiment

Data
The field NIMS system has been successful in collecting real world data. Figures 5 and 6 show collected PAR, relative humidity, and temperature, versus displacement in two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. These show a high amount of spatial and temporal variability which was obtained using a single sensor, moved to all points in the graph within a short amount of time.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Data will continuously be collected and analyzed from the NIMS deployed node in the James Reserve. Techniques will be developed, such as higher velocity node movement, to reduce the temporal variability in spatially distributed sensor data. More deployments are planned at the James reserve and at other sites to collect more data in order to facilitate the research of end users.

PEOPLE

Faculty:

Prof. William J. Kaiser

Graduate Students:

Jason Gordon
Lisa Gruzdas
Duo Liu
Chris Lucas
Richard Pon
Jeff Tseng

Undergraduate Students:

Roja Bandari
Jamie Burke
Victor Chen
Kris Porter
Rachel Scollans
Lisa Shirachi
Lynn Wang