A network of sensors can be utilized to monitor water flows into catchment areas and areas where access is difficult or expensive. This information can be combined with other sensor networks providing information on water quality, soil condition, together with long term weather forecasting to assist with the equitable and efficient distribution of water for irrigation and environmental purposes. Similar technology can be utilized to provide and early warning system for flood prone regions, particularly flash flooding.

1. To demonstrate an integrated sensor web across land-sea-air interfaces.
2. To case study a catchment-to-(adjoining) reef system as a timely and relevant issue of community and government concern about land and reef sustainability.
3. To demonstrate the utility of pervasive and timely integration of in-situ and remote-sense data in terms of scientific understanding of coupled phenomena.
4. To initiate a long-term monitoring program of the selected area.
5. To demonstrate capability in this area for larger project initiatives, including the proposed WorldBank Coral Reef Sustainability project, and the REEF focus for the QPSF.

1. A North Queensland catchment is to be chosen that has a mixed land use profile that raises land sustainability questions, as well as having potential negative offshore reef impacts. Such a mixed land use could include a combination of urban, sugar cane, rainforest and other types. The Herbert or Johnson River catchments are potential candidates.
2. The phenomena of initial interest will focus on key physical energy and material fluxes within and across these earth interfaces, such as water flows (stream discharges, currents), temperatures (surface and depth), sediments, and dissolved nutrients. 2
3. The pilot study should cover the wet and dry seasons to capture significant changes in flux.
4. The sensors will either be COTS and/or engineered to allow online connectivity via wireline or wireless technologies (ad-hoc networking, radio frequency, satellite, etc), and compliant with emerging sensor interface standards such as SensorML and OGC 3 Location Services.
5. The sensors will be integrated as a combination of online/offline resources into a sensor grid/web, and ultimately into the broadband grid fabric.
6. A number of in-situ sensors will be used to ground-truth remote-sense data captured at the same time.
7. In-situ sensors will be deployed at selected locations within the study area, both within the catchment and in the ocean.
8. A registry/repository will be constructed that defines and stores this sensor data.
9. Data/sensor access will be provided via state-of-art GIS technologies such as OGC-compliant Spatial Map Servers and Spatial Feature Servers, and available via a web portal.
10. A number of grid-based data/sensor fusion and data mining tools should demonstrate real-time pattern discovery of the multichannel sensor stream.
11. Key domain modelling contributions will come from catchment hydrology, oceanography, atmospheric modelling and a number of other disciplines. Key models will be selected for integration. For example, a potential land-air model is TOPLATS which combines the TOPMODEL distributed catchment hydrology model with a land-surface parameterization.
12. Mathematical analysis will need to be performed to enable the coupling of models.
13. Legacy codes will need to be grid-enabled and placed on a Compute Grid.
14. Web/Grid interfaces will need to be instituted for a number of data stores, and metadata defined. The work done here should provide input and guidance to a larger effort at AIMS to interface their existing data stores.
15. These refurbished data stores will be `published' to a registry (the same as for the Sensor Web), and made available on a Data Grid.
16. Spatial data access will be provided via spatial web services, such as OGC-compliant Spatial Map Servers and Spatial Feature Servers.
17. A web portal will be designed to enable virtual experimentation/modelling to be engaged.
18. Visualization and access grid will be combined with the modelling portal to provide a collaboration environment that will be trialled between project users/modellers.

1. New sensor technologies offer better ways of continually monitoring the biophysical characteristics of our natural environment. More than 1,000 types of sensors are currently available for monitoring aspects of the environment.
2. Sensor webs fuse (sometimes a large number of) distributed (in-situ and/or remote) sensors to give a more comprehensive and spatially better resolved picture of what is happening in the environment. One aspect of sensor webs (smart dust) is the utilization of many, cheap, sensors distributed in the environment. A comprehensive sensor web can be thought of as a "digital skin" over the environment.
3. There are emerging (although lacking in some areas) standards for interfacing location-based services such as sensors into both the web and grid [cf. OGC].
4. Integration among disciplines and models in one of the pressing issues in contemporary science and policy making, brought about by the need to understand coupled phenomena and systems.
5. This pilot provides a wonderful opportunity to link the terrestrial and oceanic realms to provide a better handle on the biophysical environment and for natural resource management.
6. The pilot will be leverage to showcase local capability through the WorldBank project.
7. There are a number of existing sensor web trials and experiments, among the most relevant to us are those by NASA and the EcoGrid by the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan. The EcoGrid is a sensor web being deployed to monitor Taiwan's ecological reserves as part of an LTER (long-term ecological research) program.

More detailed information is available at http://www.complexibotics.com/pervasive_environmental_monitoring

Contact: Bohdan Durnota at bohdan@tjurunga.com or bohdan@gridopia.com