Conceptual challenges and practical issues in building the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network

Freshwater lakes provide a number of important ecosystem services such as supply of drinking water, support of biotic diversity, transportation of commercial goods, and opportunity for recreation. Wireless sensor networks allow continuous, fine-grained, in situ measurements of key variables such as water temperature, dissolved gases, pH, conductivity, and chlorophyll. Instrumenting lakes with sensors capable of sampling environmental variables is becoming a standard practice. Furthermore, many limnologists around the world are interested in getting access to and performing research on data collected from lakes around the globe to provide local, regional and even global understanding of lake ecosystems. To that end, a number of limnologists, information technology experts, and engineers have joined forces to create a new, grassroots, international network, the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network. One of our goals is to build a global scalable, persistent network of lake ecology observatories. However, implementing and designing technology that meets requirements of a large-scale distributed observing systems such as GLEON has, thus far, been challenging and instructive. In this paper, we describe several key conceptual challenges in building GLEON network. We also describe several practical issues and lessons learned during operation of a typical GLEON site.