Visualization of Great Duck Island Sensor Network Data

Great Duck Island is a 237-acre island located off the coast of Maine and an important nesting ground for Leach's Storm Petrel, a common New England seabird. In spring 2002, the College of the Atlantic, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, and Intel Corp., deployed a sensor network consisting of 32~motes on the island to monitor the Petrel's nesting behavior. Using a sensor network allowed scientists to continually measure environmental data in and around the Petrel's nesting burrows without disturbing the nesting birds. Over a three-month period during summer 2002, the sensor network delivered 1.8~million measurement packets to its base station, with individual motes delivering up to 50,000 packets. Each mote was programmed to measure several environmental variables including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and light level.
We are developing an application that uses data from the sensor network's measurement database to reconstruct a selected measured variable at every location inside the area covered by the sensor network, by interpolating measured values between mote locations. A reconstruction is then evolved over time and used to create an animation of the weather conditions on Great Duck Island data for the
measurement period. The data structures and algorithms we are developing in the course of this project are independent of the specific circumstances of the Great Duck Island sensor network, especially of the number and distribution of motes and the type of measured variables. We anticipate that our work will be applicable to a wide variety of data soon to be generated by more complex, next-generation sensor networks.