Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis.
To the best of our knowledge, none of the deployment efforts reviewed here address the same scenario as ours: having (multi-year) long term deployments, based on cooperative efforts of several (heterogeneous) teams, using commercially available equipment from multiple manufacturers, with an integrated effort of data retrieval, quality control and data availability through an easy to use Web-based platform. We believe this is a more realistic scenario for ground-based environmental monitoring efforts. The current efforts within the Life Under Your Feet project ( http: lifeunderyourfeet.org ) @cite_23 are the closest to our own, also having long term, spatially distributed deployments with a Web-based data visualization interface integrated with geolocation information. However, they do not seem to deal with heterogeneous equipment and data formats, nor offer filtering aggregation options, derived datasets or quality information in their data management solution.
@cite_23
1566287531
Abstract. In principle, water quality can be managed through an integrative perspective on watersheds, facilitated by a web-based information system. This paper describes a prototype of a web-based Information System for Georgia watersheds called GWIS: Georgia Watershed Information System. The principal functionality of the system is to provide a platform for integrating state-wide efforts in environmental information collection, collation, storage, analysis, retrieval, and dissemination to all potential stakeholders. Several data management, modeling, visualization, mapping and resource management tools for watersheds, as well as interfaces for integration across diverse and dispersed data sources, are included in the system. As its initial point of departure  to provide substantial and specific content  GWIS has been populated with the high-volume high-quality (HVHQ; near continuous) water quality data acquired during field monitoring campaigns over the past 11 years with the Environmental Process Control Laboratory (EPCL) of the University of Georgia. Information Systems (EIS) modeling with artificial in