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Enviro-Net is a project that began in the department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. The main objective is to implement a central repository for environmental data and provide researchers simple and fast tools to check the quality of their data.

Visualize Data

The visualize data page is used to gather some quick insight into the data in the database. There are currently several graphing tools available including:

  1. Interactive Time Series line graphs for raw and processed (derived product) data;
  2. Boxplots for simple descriptive statistics;
  3. Data Availability;
  4. Heat Maps for data quality mining.
These tools are meant to give general insight into the data, they should not be used to generate images for publication

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NDVI and EVI Graphs

NDVI and EVI graphs can only be generated for phenology tower and nodes.

How to generate graphs:
  1. Select which clusters you would like to see plotted.
  2. Select which nodes you would like to plot. If you are planning on plotting phenology tower data, each phenology tower has been assigned a node id.
  3. Choose which indices you would like to graph.
  4. Select the type of averaging you would like to take place.
  5. Select the timespan for which you would like to collect data.
  6. Filter the values:
    • Time filter. If you know the peak hours of the day, you can select for which hours you would like to collected data.
    • Value Filter. A more general filter that allows you to select the range of values for the incoming PAR sensor.
  7. Finally just click graph. The website will gather the data and put it into graphs.

Tower/Understory/WSN Graphs

Wireless Sensor Network graphs can be generated.

How to generate graphs:
  1. Select which cluster you would like to see plotted.
  2. Select which nodes you would like to plot.
  3. Select which sensors you would like plotted (there will be one graph per sensor).
  4. Select the timespan for which you would like to collect data.

There is also options for daily averaging and removal of erroneous data.

Data Availability

This tool can be used to view the availability of data within a cluster.

  1. Select a cluster from the drop down list and click "go".

The output of this tool can be thought of as levels. Users can then drill down into these levels to gain more insight into where there is erroneous data or no data at all. The levels are as follows:

  1. Years
  2. Months
  3. Days
  4. Hours

A green background symbolizes that the data for this timespan contains no errors. Yellow means there is data but it contains errors. Red means there is no data for this timespan.

The user also has the following options at anytime:

  1. The user can click on the number of readings to view the average value of readings for this timespan.
  2. The user can click on the number of errors to view a small sample of the erroneous data.

Retrieve Data

Any data that is uploaded to the database can also be retrieved back out in CSV (Comma Separated Values) files.

NDVI and EVI

  1. Select a cluster for which you would like data from.
  2. Select the timespan for which you would like to collect data.
  3. Choose any filters on values or time that you think are appropriate.
  4. Check or Uncheck any other options you would like (which columns).

Tower/Understory Data

  1. Select a cluster for which you would like data from.
  2. Choose which sensors you would liked to collect data from.
  3. Select the timespan for which you would like to collect data.
  4. Check or Uncheck any other options you would like.

Wireless Sensor Network Data

  1. Select a cluster for which you would like data from.
  2. Choose which nodes you would like data from.
  3. Choose which sensor ids you would like data from.
  4. Select the timespan for which you would like to collect data.
  5. Check or Uncheck any other options you would like.

Uploading data

Data that is uploaded must be formatted in a specific way.

Wireless Sensor Netork Data

Data for WSN's must be formatted by these rules.

  • File Types:
    • CSV (comma separated value) files formattaed with specific values will be accepted.

  • Mandatory Values (for CSV files):
    • node_id must be a decimal number.
    • sensor_id must be a decimal number.
    • converted_value or raw_value: One of these must be present. Converted values must be a float, raw value are stored as string.
    • time: Must be formatted in 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS' or 'YY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS'.

  • Other Information:
    • The order of the above mandatory does not matter (as long as it stays consistent).

NDVI and EVI Calculations

Below are the formulas used to calculate ndvi and evi. pyr is short for Pyranometer.

  • Jenkins NDVI:
    r_tot = pyr_reflected / pyr_incoming
    r_vis = par_reflected / par_incoming
    r_nir = (2 * r_tot) - r_vis
    ndvi = (r_nir - r_vis) / (r_nir + r_vis)

  • Huemmrich NDVI:
    par_in = par_incoming * 0.25
    par_ref = par_reflect * 0.25
    p_par = (par_ref / par_in)
    p_oir = (pyr_ref - par_ref) / (pyr_in - par_in)
    ndvi = (p_oir - p_par) / (p_oir + p_par)

  • Wilson NDVI:
    R_vis = par_reflected / par_incoming
    VIS_in = 0.45 * pyr_incoming
    NIR_in = 0.55 * pyr_incoming
    VIS_out = R_vis * VIS_in
    NIR_out = pyr_reflected - VIS_out
    R_nir = NIR_out / NIR_in
    ndvi = (R_nir - R_vis) / (R_nir + R_vis)

  • EVI2:
    p_red = par_reflected / par_incoming
    p_nir = (pyr_reflected - (0.45 * pyr_incoming * p_red) / (0.55 * pyr_incoming) )
    evi2 = 2.5 * ( (p_nir - p_red) / (p_nir + (2.4 * p_red) + 1) )