University of Maine at Presque Isle undergraduate students help develop new forest monitoring product
By Sophie Knox, Research Media Intern
Understanding tree and forest health provides resource managers, land owners and researchers with the information needed to make important decisions about one of Maine’s most important ecosystems. Over the past three years, Leo Edmiston-Cyr, a scientific and technical computer programmer at the University of Maine’s Center for Research on Sustainable Forests (CRSF), has led a team of undergraduate students developing a new wireless band dendrometer that supports this effort. These devices measure tree growth, girth and health, and provide crucial data for land managers, foresters and researchers studying ecosystems. With support from the NSF E-RISE Maine-FOREST project and other NSF awards, the team engineered a cost-effective band dendrometer that can transfer data wirelessly, provide immediate results and eliminate frequent trips into the field to retrieve data manually.
This summer, Edmiston-Cyr and Maine-FOREST partnered with University of Maine at Presque Isle’s (UMPI) Mark Royer, assistant professor of computer science, and a group of undergraduate students to create a web interface that pairs with the dendrometers. UMPI second-year students Jason Mantello, studying cybersecurity, and Mayan Pratt, studying computer science, worked to develop a web application that allows researchers to monitor and analyze data from the dendrometers remotely.
Mantello and Pratt spent their summer coding the foundation for a functional, user-friendly web interface that makes dendrometer data easy to view and download. Moving forward the team is debugging and adding features to the web interface to improve visuals and functionality, which will allow the users to see map views in relation to the data from the dendrometers. These features will increase usability including, dendrometer network status, data formatting, geospatial maps and visual components. Having access to real time data in this way, the web interface is able to provide stakeholders with brand new ways to monitor Maine’s forests.
This research project has offered the opportunity for the students to collaborate as they work through different challenges. “This project has been a major stepping stone in my understanding of programming as a whole,” said Mantello, who credits this project for shaping his perception of computer science in a real world environment.
Discussing the ultimate goal of this work, Edmiston-Cyr said, “My passion is making good software and helping people do it”. This project originally started with the goal to make a wireless band dendrometer that had features that other products on the market did not but has evolved further into making dendrometer data accessible online in real time. Edmiston-Cyr described the goal of the web interface as, “The cream of the crop. Being able to see all of the data accessible online in real time will be amazing.” This interface will make viewing dendrometer data the easiest it’s ever been. As Edmiston-Cyr puts it, “This three-year journey has been a long enjoyable path to make something really cool that has the potential to help land managers, foresters and researchers far into the future.” This wireless technology allows hundreds of dendrometers to be in use with data accessible on one web interface. This research has provided undergraduate students with opportunities to develop a product that will be directly applied within its field of study.
Additional funding for this project was provided by the NSF RII Track-2 INSPIRES award and the PERSEUS grant USDA NIFA SAS Award.