Automated Environmental Monitoring with Remote Biological Sensors for Large Areas*

Currently, ecological monitoring is an important issue of discussions in science, industry, and politics. This work presents a distributed telematics infrastructure which allows for flexible ecological monitoring of large areas. By interconnecting beehives, a large network of distributed sensors is installed, which allows not only for a detailed long term and near realtime monitoring of the bee behavior in different environments. Also the information which can be deducted from the bees themselves (e.g. about pollution) can be collected this way, which enables monitoring of large areas surrounding the hives. In this work, a system is proposed which provides the telematics infrastructure to realize this method of ecological monitoring. It can also be extended by mobile robots with special sensor equipment to get more detailed and accurate measurements in zones of special interest. Details on requirements, system design, and the implementation are given.