Development of a Wireless Erosion Measuring Network

Erosion poses a great threat for many ecosystems including forest. This is especially true for suburban forests that have to deal with additional pressure compared to natural forests. The suburban aesthetic forest of Thessaloniki, known as «Seich-Sou» is situated on the hills that surround the city. The terrain has moderate to steep slopes with the elevations ranging from 50 to 450 m. Seich Sou apart from its role as a recreational forest also serves as a protective network from floods and erosion to the city of Thessaloniki. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design of a modular network of stations for the measurement of surface erosion. These stations will continuously communicate with a central computer and provide all the required data. For the design of the network, the entire area of the forest was digitized using Geographical Information Systems, followed by the creation of the Triangular Irregular Network - Digital Elevation Model (TIN-DEM). The next step was to conduct a visibility analysis based on the various ranges of wireless network technologies. This was necessary in order to create a wireless network with the least number of stations that were able to monitor the area accurately. The number of stations was based on the visibility analysis and the desired accuracy. The communication among the stations was implemented using commercial wireless protocols (802.11x).