Chips offer insights into birdlife

Duck Island is home to the storm petrel

Remote sensors are being used to find out more about birds in their natural habitat. Molly Bentley went to Great Duck Island in Maine to see how researchers are using the technology.

On an island off the US coast of Maine, Alan Mainwaring kneels in the duff near a black spruce pine tree.

At its base is a hole and a pile of excavated dirt that suggests animal activity, probably recent.

Instinctively, Dr Mainwaring, a computer engineer at the Intel Research Laboratory in Berkeley, California, pulls back. Then he rolls up his sleeve and reaches in.

"I'm pretty sure I'm bigger than anything that's in there," he says, one cheek against moss, and his forearm underground.

After exploring more than 40 burrows, experience tells him he will not fair much worse than a peck from a disgruntled beak. After all, bird-watching is not without some risk.

Dr Mainwaring retrieves his arm. The nest is bird-free, but now it has a new occupant: a wireless sensor that he has embedded in the burrow wall.

Real-time results

It is one of more than 40 biological sensors - or motes - buried on the island, each only slightly larger than the two double-A batteries that power them.

Petrel: Rarely seen by birdwatchers

The latest has already begun to collect data on the conditions inside the burrow and relay it to a laptop computer.

This is birding without a field guide or binoculars. Ultimately, the scientist will be absent as well.

Dr Mainwaring is hoping to track one of Maine's most elusive seabirds, the storm petrel, with a subterranean online sensor network, and do so from his office 3,000 miles away.

He stands up and tucks the remaining motes in his jacket pocket. Ever-shrinking computers allow one tiny mote to carry a suite of sensors that collect data on temperature, barometric pressure, humidity and infrared heat.

The sensors then use low-power radios to communicate with each other.

The resulting network averages readings, flags abrupt changes, such as temperature rise, and feeds information in near real-time to the web.

While remote sensor networks have been tested in machines, the installation on Great Duck Island, a 250-acre nature reserve, is the first application of a sensor network to a natural habitat.

The project is a collaboration between the Berkeley Intel Lab and the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, that oversees the nature reserve along with the Nature Conservancy.

Exciting research

College of the Atlantic biologist and president Steve Katona says the sensors already show promise for environmental research.

It will enable us to study ecosystems at a level that has not been conceived

Steve Katona, College of the Atlantic

"These little gadgets are going to see a real change in how we look at the world," said Dr Katona, from his office on the mainland.

Dr Mainwaring likes to compare the data received from sensor networks to satellite photos, the more familiar form of remote sensing, which create topographical or weather maps.

While a satellite gave an overall picture of a forest, he said, a sensor network provided information on every tree or, in this case, every bird nest.

It is an exciting prospect for a biologist. "It will enable us to study ecosystems at a level that has not been conceived," said Dr Katona.

Motion sensors

While Dr Mainwaring puts bird nests online, on the opposite coast, in California, Intel engineer Robert Szewczyk scans the computer data streaming from Great Duck Island.

His finger isolates the infrared reading, which suggests how much time the birds spend in their burrows. Data from mote 29, for example, tell him that the nest is empty.

Wireless biological sensors placed in nests

"During the day the occupancy sensor reads more or less nothing," says Mr Szewczyk. "But in the evening, there's a distinct signal from the motion sensor."

It is a good sign. The first test of the sensor network, he says, is to determine whether the underground motes can actually collect and transmit data over the internet.

The mote's infrared sensor has detected the bird's body heat when it entered the nest.

The motes have a few advantages over human data loggers. Sensor networks collect the sort of raw data that biologists collect in the field, except that a mote can go where a human cannot, like down a six-inch-wide petrel burrow.

And the sensors take readings on many variables, continuously. Even the most diligent graduate students cannot be everywhere at every moment in a research field.

Nor would you want them to be. The key to the technology is that once it is installed, grad-students and scientists like Dr Mainwaring can leave the field and the birds in peace.

Future plans

A remote sensor network has the potential to virtually eliminate human disturbance in fragile ecosystems, such as a nesting ground, where even a quick stroll can leave animals stressed.

"Just because an animal settles down and preens its feathers after a few moments with us doesn't necessarily mean that animal has really recovered," says Dr Katona.

"The effects of our presence can be subtle and can last for some time."

This has the potential to be as revolutionary, if not more so, then what happened when a modest number of computers formed the primordial internet

Alan Mainwaring, Intel Research Laboratory

But the technology does not limit human participation in petrel research. The data is available to anyone with internet access.

Dr Mainwaring predicts that the network will extend beyond bird nests. Berkeley's Intel Lab plans to test a sensor network in the James Reserve in southern California, with the University of California, Los Angeles.

There are also plans to install motes in an Oregon vineyard. Sensors on grapevines could monitor the conditions of single plants, said Dr Mainwaring, and lead to greater precision in agriculture.

But it does not stop there. He envisions the day when billions of things become networked.

"This has the potential to be as revolutionary, if not more so, than what happened when a modest number of computers formed the primordial internet," said Dr Mainwaring.