River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON)
Visualizing the Unseen River
Beneath the calm surface of the Hudson River lies an invisible, vibrant and dynamic world. From salt water to fresh, silt to sand, this diverse and fragile ecosystem is a critical source of fresh water, food, transportation, recreation and cultural beauty for the 12 million people who live within its watershed.
But do we know enough about this invisible world to protect it?
"The integration of science, technology and policy remains one of the great, unresolved challenges of contemporary environmentalism,” says John Cronin, Director and Chief Executive Officer of Beacon Institute. “The task of the 20th century was to raise public awareness of environmental issues and address a century-old legacy of environmental abuses that plagued land, air and water. The challenge of the 21st century is to create the innovations that will harmonize the daily activities of the human community with the continuing needs of the local and global environment.”
This is the promise of the River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON), a pioneering initiative between Beacon Institute and IBM with the potential for far-reaching implications.
"This collaboration between Beacon Institute and IBM will create a large-scale river ‘observatory’ using real-time monitoring technologies currently being used in the study of oceans,” says Arthur C. Sanderson, Ph.D., Senior Science Advisor for Beacon Institute and Professor of Electrical, Computer and System Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “With the expertise of IBM and academic and government partners, we are taking that concept several steps further. REON will be a first-of-its-kind information infrastructure that can collect, sort, analyze and graphically portray information from continuous streams of real-time physical, chemical and biological data from hundreds, possibly thousands, of sensors that would be installed in the Hudson River."
Real-time monitoring and observation technologies provide new ways of looking at phenomena at multiple levels of resolution. “Scientists used to have to fill up a bottle, bring it back to the lab for analysis, and then repeat that activity enough times to get a data set,” explains Sanderson. “We would like to have the ability to continuously monitor activity from the microscopic to macroscopic scale, and build scientific models to understand how changes in the chemistry and biology affect the fish, river and larger ecology."
Sanderson explains the multi-scale concept. “At the microscopic scale we see biological cells and chemicals. At the meso scale, we see water flowing, fish swimming and plants growing. At the macro scale, we see 315 miles of river and its watershed, with the Adirondacks at one end and New York City at the other.” On the temporal scale, scientists can observe phenomena that occur in micro- or milliseconds or over seconds, minutes and hours, as well as broader ecosystem changes that occur over years, decades and centuries.
The data collection backbone of REON will be a distributed computing network composed of multiple types of advanced environmental sensors, each sensor with its own computer chip. Adding inexpensive and power-efficient communications systems to each sensor is like giving each sensor a cell phone to transmit its data. A networked array of sensors in the river, perhaps one every 100 meters, will provide the data necessary to locally observe spatial variations in such variables as temperature, pressure, salinity, turbidity (water “cloudiness”), dissolved oxygen and other basic water chemistry parameters.
New sensor prototypes use optical properties to understand biological characteristics such as chlorophyll distributions. Acoustic imaging techniques are used to map the river bottom and will be able to characterize the sediment types. High resolution acoustic imaging will be used to find biological organisms. In the future, in situ (“in place”) microscopy could identify organisms from images, and genetic sequencing instruments could identify biological organisms by their DNA/RNA sequences.
“New generations of sensors will measure specific physical, chemical and biological variables with great sensitivity. The measurement of dissolved oxygen in the Hudson River on a continuous time basis will tell us how a local region of the river may be able to support biological organisms. When changes occur—for example as contaminants are introduced, biological species migrate, agricultural nutrients accumulate or water is heated during power generation—these interactions may affect dissolved oxygen and the sustainability of that region of the river,” Sanderson explains.
All of these sensors transmitting information in real-time will result in massive amounts of data. Collecting, processing and making sense of that much data is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in implementing REON.
Enter IBM. REON will be the first public implementation of IBM’s recently introduced Stream Computing system. Four years in development, this high-performance computer system rapidly analyzes data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making.
“The hardware and software we have today are not suited for real-time analysis of data. Instead they were built to pause life, query a database of information of things that happened in the past and provide an answer, even while important new information is still coming in,” explains Sharon Nunes, IBM’s Vice President of Strategic Growth Initiatives, Big Green Innovations. “Our Stream Computing system combines a fundamentally new architecture with breakthrough mathematical algorithms to create a forward-looking analysis of data from any source – narrowing down data to meet user queries, and then continuously refining the answer as additional data becomes available. This system’s ability to analyze information as it happens has very powerful applications for environmental science, financial services, government, astronomy, traffic control, healthcare and many other scientific and business areas.”
The new computer system has the ability to assemble applications on the fly based on the inquiry it is trying to solve, using a new software architecture that pulls in the components it needs to make tailored information available to a variety of end-users – from researchers, to teachers and schoolchildren, to policymakers and the general public.
Applications of REON data could include the ability to visualize the movement of chemical constituents, monitor water quality and protect fish species as they migrate, as well as provide a better scientific understanding of river and estuary ecosystems.
"This project provides a dynamic synergy between computational technology, environmental sensing and environmental science, providing a new way of studying, understanding and managing a valuable natural system," observes W. Rockwell "Rocky" Geyer, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Chairman of the Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering Department at Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Project Advisor for Beacon Institute/WHOI Postdoctorate Program. "As a natural scientist, I am very excited to participate in a program that can transcend the arcane and esoteric details of our individual research projects to achieve a truly interdisciplinary synthesis of the natural and human-influenced dynamics of the Hudson River ecosystem."
"Never before has there been a way of doing environmental science that allows us to observe so many multiple spatial and temporal scales at once. This initiative could lead to new paradigms of doing science,” notes Sanderson.
Cronin concurs, "This new way of observing, understanding and predicting how large river and estuary ecosystems work ultimately will allow us to translate that knowledge into better policy, management and education for the Hudson River and for rivers and estuaries worldwide."
