Hi everyone.

Excited to be part of this group especially since IoT can pretty much trace it's roots to wildlife monitoring. I've actually been involved in sensor networks since 2003. One of the seminal papers that kind of kicked off wireless sensor networking was the Great Duck Island Project run in 2001 which was a battery operated wireless sensor network used for habitat monitoring.

The breeding habits of storm petrels needed to be monitored nonintrusively and so a research group put together a set of battery operated wireless sensor nodes to collect data. The wireless radio at the time only had the range of a few meters so they had to create a mesh system to get the data to a gateway which then sent the data via satellite to a server in a research lab at UC Berkeley. From there, it was collected and analyzed.

The system survived for six months sending data regularly on the mating habits of the birds which was amazing since the sensors were essentially housed in makeshift plastic jars. This project inspired me to get involved in wireless sensor networks and eventually led me to work on the Zigbee specification in the Zigbee Alliance. That in turn led me to various projects with sensor networks for the environment and development with UNESCO and World Bank.

Also all the components of the Great Duck Island experiment have now been coined as tech buzzwords: Internet of Things (the wireless sensor nodes, mesh protocol, and gateway), Cloud Computing (satellite transmission to internet and server via TCP/IP), Data Science and Machine Learning (the statistical data analysis). But the reason why all these components existed are actually quite simple and practical.

So I'm happy this group exists because it allows me to get back to the roots of why I started in IoT in the first place. Wireless sensor networks for wildlife monitoring :)

If you're interested, here's a link to the Great Duck Island paper.