Applications of low-cost environmental monitoring systems for fine-scale abiotic measurements in forest ecology

Abstract

Ecological studies have long examined large-scale geographic gradients in abiotic conditions and their relationship to the structure and function of ecological systems, but many critical processes in forested systems are driven by abiotic gradients that vary at fine spatial and temporal scales. To adequately characterize fine scale microclimatic variability, intensive sampling is required that may be cost-prohibitive with commercially available instrumentation. The expanded availability of inexpensive, and open-source environmental monitoring systems may meet the need to advance mechanistic understanding of fine-scale ecological processes. Here, we (1) present a custom, open-source, and inexpensive environmental monitoring system, (2) evaluate its performance against commercial systems and sensors, and (3) demonstrate its utility in a broad range of forest ecology applications. We demonstrate that temperature and humidity measurements are reliably captured with open-source data loggers and sensors are strongly correlated to research-grade instruments (R2 = 0.97). Further, these systems generate reliable data at 13-80% of the cost of comparable commercial systems primarily due to higher potential for scalability. We demonstrate applications in forest ecology to examine micrometeorology in fire prone ecosystems, microsite variability in dry conifer systems, and climate mediation effects in urban forested systems. The use of open-source data loggers for a broad range of forest ecology applications offer opportunities for more robust environmental characterization especially in forest ecology applications where high spatial and temporal resolution is necessary to understand ecological phenomena such as fire, regeneration, and phenology. Increased use, development, and validation of low-cost instrumentation with commercial options will increase confidence of their use among researchers in these and other applications.