Environmental Observing Systems for Assessing Impacts of Land Use Change

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the application of technology solutions for enabling environmental research. This project develops a complete environmental observing system in support of an investigation of the hydrological and ecological impacts of land use change on the coast of South Carolina. The land use change study is an ongoing multi-disciplinary effort involving the collection of a large number of monitored and sampled parameters at Bannockburn Plantation, which is located near the City of Georgetown in South Carolina. Long term monitoring will support a hydrological and ecological assessment of the study site before, during, and after proposed residential and commercial development. There are three primary objectives of this work. The first is the comprehensive instrumentation of a portion of the Bannockburn study site for hydrological parameters. The second is the implementation of a wireless sensor network to support the remote acquisition of monitored data. The third objective is the creation of a reliable and robust software solution for transmitting and distributing real time observation data. Collectively, these three objectives provide a complete environmental observing system. Results of this work will benefit land use change research by providing access to real time observation data and enabling the integration of powerful analysis tools. This research will provide a basis for the development of future environmental observation systems

Geographic Information Systems for Real-Time Environmental Sensing at Multiple Scales

The purpose of this investigation was to design, implement, and apply a real-time geographic information system for data intensive water resource research and management. The research presented is part of an ongoing, interdisciplinary research program supporting the development of the Intelligent River® observation instrument. The objectives of this research were to 1) design and describe software architecture for a streaming environmental sensing information system, 2) implement and evaluate the proposed information system, and 3) apply the information system for monitoring, analysis, and visualization of an urban stormwater improvement project located in the City of Aiken, South Carolina, USA. This research contributes to the fields of software architecture and urban ecohydrology. The first contribution is a formal architectural description of a streaming environmental sensing information system. This research demonstrates the operation of the information system and provides a reference point for future software implementations. Contributions to urban ecohydrology are in three areas. First, a characterization of soil properties for the study region of the City of Aiken, SC is provided. The analysis includes an evaluation of spatial structure for soil hydrologic properties. Findings indicate no detectable structure at the scales explored during the study. The second contribution to ecohydrology comes from a long-term, continuous monitoring program for bioinfiltration basin structures located in the study area. Results include an analysis of soil moisture dynamics based on data collected at multiple depths with high spatial and temporal resolution. A novel metric is introduced to evaluate the long-term performance of bioinfiltration basin structures based on soil moisture observation data. Findings indicate a decrease in basin performance over time for the monitored sites. The third contribution to the field of ecohydrology is the development and application of a spatially and temporally explicit rainfall infiltration and excess model. The model enables the simulation and visualization of bioinfiltration basin hydrologic response at within-catchment scales. The model is validated against observed soil moisture data. Results include visualizations and stormwater volume calculations based on measured versus predicted bioinfiltration basin performance over time

Moving Forward: Refinement of the INTELLIGENT RIVER, A Basin-Scale Monitoring Instrument

2012 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Exploring Opportunities for Collaborative Water Research, Policy and Managemen