NSF Award
0223998
0223998<br/>Roberts<br/>This planning grant provides support for a series of three workshops that will bring together technological, scientific, educational and management experts to develop a plan for the use and application of remote sensing and real-time monitoring technologies for research and management of rivers and estuaries. These workshops will be organized in partnership with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and they will serve as a companion to a demonstration project, sponsored by the Rivers and Estuaries Center on the Hudson River, that will use a selected area of the Hudson estuary as a test site for real-time monitoring of physical, chemical and biological river parameters. The parallel tracks of these two projects will allow workshop participants to avail themselves of an operating "river laboratory" and will allow the demonstration project to utilize the guidance and expertise of the workshop participants. The workshop and demonstration projects will integrate their findings to support a proposal that will seek to use the 154 mile Hudson River estuary as the model for the deployment of a remote sensing array that will utilize novel miniaturized sensor technology, robotics and existing monitoring stations to produce a continuous stream of river data transmitted by an advanced high-bandwidth, real-time communications system integrated with satellite remote-sensing imagery. The specific objectives of the workshops will be to (1) understand the status of other efforts to wire the earth and the biosphere, (2) identify the technological requirements and management and educational applications for the unique setting of rivers and estuaries and (3) develop a plan for an integrated in-situ and watershed-wide instrumentation of rivers and estuaries.
