Technology that Monitors Species Health

Can endangered species use wireless telephones to tell scientists how they’re doing?

Perhaps, if a research project—supported by Microsoft investment and technology—comes to fruition. Scientists with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), located in Brisbane, Australia, create sensor networks that are built around wireless telephones and use those networks to monitor the health of birds and other species remotely.

QUT professor and project leader Paul Roe says the wireless telephone project aims to use computer technology to analyze large amounts of data. With remote sensors such as wireless telephones, scientists today can gather large amounts of data quickly.

"But you’d soon run out of graduate students who could listen to it all," he says. "Even with a few telephones, we’re quickly amassing terabytes of data. So the real interesting work is in data analysis, in learning ways to analyze and manage data so scientists have something they can interpret."

Wireless Wildlife

For the past year, QUT researchers have placed wireless phones that run Microsoft Windows Mobile in three areas where birds and other animals can be heard. In one case, phone sensors have been placed to capture the calls of Lewin’s rails, small rare birds found in subtropical and lowland forests in Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea.

Audio monitors help to mitigate difficulties in rail observation. Rails prefer to stay hidden in vegetation, where they forage for food. Additionally, in the area where the rails live, the grass can reach six feet in height and the area is infested with snakes, many of which are venomous. This is not ideal for human observers.

So, the rails phone in their presence.

"Using wireless phones makes perfect sense", says Roe. "We’re trying to use commoditized hardware and software—it’s cheaper and easy to use," he says. The birds’ calls are captured by telephones, which can be turned on and off remotely, and relayed to central data storage, where they are analyzed for broad patterns.

Monitoring the Heartbeat of an Ecosystem

The sound of individual birds or other animals such as frogs is not so important, says Roe. What matters is the way a bank of sound bites could indicate large-scale changes in ecosystems.

"It’s a bit like have an EKG in the heart of the environment," says Roe. "We’re using some Web 2.0 technology to tag and annotate the data, and have a kind of robot that trolls through it and determines particular calls and species. We can tell if we’re hearing a distress call or mating call, for instance, and we can integrate that with data about weather or climate, or with spatial data."

Over a long period of time, says Roe, wireless reports from the wild could indicate that species are behaving in different ways, such as arriving in nesting areas earlier or later, perhaps as a result of climate change or habitat changes.

"Ecologists think it’s the long-term data that will prove most important," he says, because it creates the opportunity to do environmental "banking," in which critical areas can be created or held in reserve, and development rights purchased against the capital in the "bank." That way, there is no net loss of habitat. But without a big-picture idea of ecosystem health, it is difficult to estimate the amount of productive habitat.

QUT-Microsoft Collaborate to Manage Data

Queensland University of Technology’s remote sensor project makes use of a wide range of Microsoft products. In addition to Windows Mobile, researchers are deploying Microsoft SQL Server to manage data, and Microsoft Virtual Earth as a mapping tool to show sensor locations. Microsoft .NET Compact Framework is designed to work with small devices such as wireless telephones and bring everything together.

Microsoft also offers financial assistance through a USD $900,000 grant it made in 2006 to help launch QUT’s eResearch center, which is managing the sensing project. QUT is one of many research centers worldwide that Microsoft supports and collaborates with. The eResearch center in Brisbane specializes in smart tools for sensor networks, parallel computing, and bioinformatics.

And when the phones ring, they answer.