Safe and Healthy Waters

There is a diverse range of environmental stakeholders connected with a shared interest in the health of the great lakes.

All users of the lakes rely on information to conduct activities, yet in the past support and maintenance has been arbitrarily reduced at the same time it is becoming most important.

Shifting patterns

As natural systems face rising stress and new risks, it is important to have a monitoring system to understand the scale and rate of these changes, as well as a rapid response capacity for emergency awareness and recovery.

By helping this information be shared with

New technologies

The powerful new radio technology called LoRaWAN is being used to support environmental monitoring and boating in the Great Lakes. In combination with the open.landscape.network, it provides an openly accessible, subscription-free digital infrastructure that functions entirely independently to established telecommunications providers.

Some of the very first deployments of LoRaWAN were to support boat monitoring in canals of the Netherlands, but the technology has now been integrated into commercial products for boat tracking and maritime security.

While communities such as The Things Network have done important work to enable the deployment and maintenance of LoRaWAN networks, the sometimes reduced coverage and accessibility compared to existing systems remains a challenge.

Innovative models

By involving the local fishing community, commercial stakeholders as well as By helping reduce the size of risk exposure for insurance providers, the system has enabled deployment of more accurate, higher-coverage weather stations.

The information being produced has raised the interest of a PhD student that has the support of local council, and is already contributing to research influencing local policy decisions.

By making it faster and easier to deploy infrastructure and engage community members in collaboration, the Open Landscape Network is helping create more resilient, independently-owned monitoring systems.

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