Real-time and spatially distributed monitoring of microclimate.

Recently, climate change impacts have become strikingly tangible, with prolonged periods of drought and temperature records being broken. These weather extremes strongly impact soil ecosystem services, with potentially important economic consequences for agriculture, nature conservation, garden maintenance and other sectors. Society increasingly needs to cope with these impacts, thus spurring new economic activities that demand large-scale heat and drought monitoring. In this PhD project, I will pioneer cost-effective approaches for large soil microclimate networks that involve 1000s of monitoring locations. These allow to assess the vulnerability of soil ecosystems to heat and drought, and verify whether implemented adaptation measures are effective (e.g. water infiltration and soil moisture buffering). As a proof of concept, extensive microclimate networks will be deployed in gardens and nature reserves across Flanders, taking advantage of the new TMS-NB sensor, which enables low-cost and real-time measurements of soil temperature and moisture through the Internet of Things. This new data source will allow identifying the drivers of spatiotemporal variability in microclimate along the urban-rural gradient. Novel software tools will be developed for the data streams originating from these sensor networks, thus making the resulting data and insights readily available to relevant societal actors (e.g. farmers, garden maintenance, nature reserve managers).

Keywords:CLIMATE ADAPTATION, INTERNET OF THINGS, WATER MANAGEMENT

Disciplines:Climatology, Climate change, Global ecology, Soil ecology, Environmental monitoring