Technology and Expertise Transfer

Being interdisciplinary and multi-institutional in nature, ANR activities include participants from various institutions (e.g., UCSD, SDSU, UCSB, Caltech, Yale) and disciplines (e.g., astronomy, biology, earth sciences, structural engineering), and with ties to large NSF-supported activities such as NEES, NEON, and EarthScope. A directly educational component is predominantly with Native American reservations (Tribal Digital Village Network) and the California Wolf Center. In addition, participation exists with various agencies, predominantly the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF/CalFire, state firefighters), and the San Diego Sheriff's Department, with an emphasis on incident/crisis management and public safety applications that might benefit from high performance wireless date networking. In addition, a major collaboration evolved with the National Park Service.

Technology and expertise transfer is an ongoing activity. The first major success story was enabling Native Americans to architect, design, build and manage their on large-scale wide-area wireless network and its mostly solar-powered backbone, which had its roots with HPWREN. Multiple Technology Transfer workshops with the National Park Service included representatives from various parks, and is helping to diffuse tools, methodologies, and communications systems into diverse area throughout the country. Besides the network infrastructure itself, a big part of this partnership includes the Live Interactive Virtual Explorations distance learning activity, but it also extends to environmental monitoring stations, Condor cameras, and training/enabling NPS staff to enhance our concepts and technologies even further, and even extends to teaching training classes for microwave tower climbing. A further major technology transfer activity is under way with Cal Fire, and their needs for a comprehensive wide area data network in rural and remote areas.