An IoT Data Infrastructure for Climate Change Monitoring

Tech Talk with Maria Mirto and Valentina Scardigno.

Abstract

Forest ecosystems have an increasing importance for planetary health, with particular regard to human society. Climate change will likely alter the frequency and intensity of forest disturbances, including drought-induced tree and forest mortality. The productivity and distribution of forests could be affected by changes in temperature, precipitation, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Moreover, forest wildfires are a critical problem in Apulia and Epirus regions, where this phenomenon is extremely dangerous, especially in summer.
Although much progress has been made to monitor and model the causes of tree mortality due to extreme events, the current understanding of tree physiological responses to drought and heat still does not enable a realistic estimate of forest mortality episodes under rapid climate change. For these reasons, monitoring forest ecosystems is vital, mainly based on advanced technologies that collect heterogeneous data in new and integrated ways.
In this tech talk, Maria and Valentina will present an operational platform for wildfire prevention and monitoring developed by the Advanced Scientific Computing Division – CMCC Foundation. Weather forecast models, fire danger models, fire behaviour models and fire risk indices in Apulia and Epirus regions support wildfire prevention. Wireless sensor networks, HD video cameras and drones perform real-time monitoring.
Finally, the use cases developed in several projects (OFIDIA2, HIGHLANDER and SEBASTIEN) and based on IoT technologies will also be presented.

Bios

Maria Mirto received her degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, in February 2002. She received her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Lecce in October 2006. Since 2008, she has been a member of the CMCC Foundation within the Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) division. She is currently involved in the SWITCH project and has also been involved in the HIGHLANDER, OFIDIA2, OFIDIA1, and EU FP7 IS-ENES2 projects. Her research interests include IoT, Data Management, High Performance and Grid/Cloud Computing, Bioinformatics, Workflow and P2P Information Services. She co-authors over 60 papers in refereed books, journals and proceedings on distributed data management, data analytics/mining, grid/cloud computing and bioinformatics.

Valentina Scardigno obtained her master’s degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Salento, Lecce, in October 2020. Since the same year she has been working at the “Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change” (CMCC Foundation) within the “Advanced Scientific Computing division” (ASC). Her activities concern Data Management, Earth Science Data Analysis, IoT Technologies, Data post-processing and visualization. She has been involved in the ANTIDOTE, OFIDIA2, NEMESI, HIGHLANDER and SEBASTIEN projects for elaborating, processing, storing, and visualising data from IoT wireless sensors.

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