Miniaturized Technology Helps Create Better Land Use Opportunities

"The rapid miniaturization of technologies behind cameras, cellphones and wireless computers is allowing scientists to build innovative networks of small sensors that they say will produce a new era of ecological insight and, in time, help save the planet...

Scientists hope to learn more about soil contaminants, land changes, water flow, invasive species, ocean cycles, continent formation, the places atmospheric carbon are stored, the reasons that volcanoes erupt and the ways viruses and gene fragments move through the environment.

Motes have custom-designed computer chips and sensors and are wireless and powered by batteries or solar cells, allowing scientists to use them in remote places and to move them around. Networks of them, and their larger cousins, are envisioned as dotting swaths of North America and running through the waters of the West Coast from California to Canada.

Some sites are to be permanent, with networks recording data for long periods, unlike summer field studies or two-week ocean research voyages. Such continuity is considered vital for better understanding how humans are altering the planet."

Thanks to Brenda Meyer