FORTE: An Open-Source System for Cost-Effective and Scalable Environmental Monitoring
🤖 AI Summary
High-cost and inflexible monitoring of forest ecosystem responses to extreme weather events motivates this work. We present FORTE, an open-source environmental monitoring system designed for ecological resilience assessment. FORTE employs a modular, low-power wireless sensor network architecture, integrating LTE-M wide-area backhaul with distributed satellite-enabled nodes to establish a scalable data infrastructure. It introduces the first system-level requirements framework specifically tailored for ecological monitoring and achieves full-stack openness—including hardware schematics, firmware, software, and comprehensive documentation. Empirical evaluation demonstrates multi-month battery lifetime per node, substantially lower cost compared to commercial alternatives, and consistently high data quality. FORTE has been validated through field deployments across diverse forest ecosystems and exhibits inherent extensibility to non-forest biomes, including grasslands and wetlands.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Forests are an essential part of our biosphere, regulating climate, acting as a sink for greenhouse gases, and providing numerous other ecosystem services. However, they are negatively impacted by climatic stressors such as drought or heat waves. In this paper, we introduce FORTE, an open-source system for environmental monitoring with the aim of understanding how forests react to such stressors. It consists of two key components: (1) a wireless sensor network (WSN) deployed in the forest for data collection, and (2) a Data Infrastructure for data processing, storage, and visualization. The WSN contains a Central Unit capable of transmitting data to the Data Infrastructure via LTE-M and several spatially independent Satellites that collect data over large areas and transmit them wirelessly to the Central Unit. Our prototype deployments show that our solution is cost-effective compared to commercial solutions, energy-efficient with sensor nodes lasting for several months on a single charge, and reliable in terms of data quality. FORTE's flexible architecture makes it suitable for a wide range of environmental monitoring applications beyond forest monitoring. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we describe the high-level requirements necessary for developing an environmental monitoring system. Second, we present an architecture and prototype implementation of the requirements by introducing our FORTE platform and demonstrating its effectiveness through multiple field tests. Lastly, we provide source code, documentation, and hardware design artifacts as part of our open-source repository.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Environmental Monitoring
Forest Response
Extreme Weather
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Open-source
Cost-effective
Scalable and Flexible
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