Workshop Goals

Global biodiversity is profoundly affected by both natural and man-made changes. Monitoring the resulting impact on the environment requires gathering and analysing large collection of data. The confluence of three technological trends promises to have a profound influence on this process:

  1. Modern sensor and computer technology is furnishing researchers with increasingly sophisticated equipment to set up radio-linked sensor networks, tailor-made for the unsupervised monitoring of large and distributed biotopes.
  2. The ubiquity of internet access provides experts with efficient means to tap into the combined contributions and expertise of large crowds of web-connected people, thus creating an enormous pool of resources ready to be harnessed.
  3. Last but not least, emerging semantic web technologies are forging standards and tools that facilitate aggregation and analysis of, and access to, heterogeneous web-based databases.
As a result, it has become feasible to link up sensors, databases, human expertise, and even machine intelligence in large scale monitoring projects. This effectively signals the emergence of a new trend in biodiversity monitoring: the use of pervasive sensing and collective intelligence in distributed networks allowing resources to be shared and reconfigured in a dynamic fashion.

This three day workshop will explore the opportunities and challenges that result from these new developments. In addition to invited talks on pioneering applications, there will be peer-reviewed oral and poster presentations. Companies specializing in sensor technology will be invited to demonstrate their products. A selection of the presented papers will be published in a special issue (Journal to be announced).

Organizers

Eric Pauwels (CWI, Amsterdam, NL), Ruben Huele (CML - Leiden University, NL), Wouter Los (UVA, Amsterdam, NL)