MIT Media Lab/Univ. Hawaii Field Trials (March 2001)

Site Information

If you are not familiar with Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, you will first want to check the web site with pictures.  Click this link: Pictures and information about the Joint Project

Problem Description: Why we are doing this study

The following statement was proposed as the focus of the March Field Trials.

The SouthWest Rift Zone is a popular area with tourists to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It is a barren area that is the result of several massive eruptive events that have occurred over the past hundred years. The deep ash has been subjected to acid rain (perhaps as acidic as pH 2) and there is now a rock crust covering the area. There are also rocks, most the size of a basketball or larger, that have fallen from onto this area. It is dry -- although we don't know exactly how dry. It is probably a desert (with less than 15 inches of rain a year).

There are some plants in this area but they are small shrubs. They are sparsely spread out and if you don't look for them, you probably won't even see them. One of these is Silene hawaiiensis, one of the Federally listed threatened species.

We don't know much about Silene or the environment in which it lives.

Here is the problem. The nearest weather station is only about 3.5 miles away.  Even though it is close, it is located in a rain forest.  As noted above, the Silene population is living at the SW Rift Zone in what appears to be a desert.

The two areas are very different in ways other than rainfall. The sky is usually clear at the SW Rift Zone while it is generally cloudy in the rain forest. There is a near-constant wind at the SW Rift Zone but one doesn't sense this in the rain forest. There may be other differences, but you get the idea: there is a tremendous change over a very short distance.

If we are going to understand the biology of the Silene, we need to know about the environment. That's where the instrumentation comes in.

We can't put in a regular weather station because it would be seen by the public. People come to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to see this interesting landscapes. As a result, the Park has strict rules about upsetting such a vista.

The plan is to locate a number of weather stations (our hidden kind) around the area so we can get an idea of the local climate. Then we will run a string of weather stations up to the Volcano Observatory where we have access to a T-1 line. Getting weather along the way is important since there is an obvious gradient that can be seen in the increasing density and stature of the vegetation. The rare Silene, by the way, only is found in the relatively harsh environments and is not near the Volcano Observatory.

If we want, we can easily complement this placement of instruments by locating a few others around the Research Center. This is an area in the rain forest that also has convenient access to a T-1 line. It would make an interesting contrast. This is the area, by the way, that we've been using to test our camera. We now have about six months of daytime hourly photos of the forest.

What we hope we can do is to capture the pattern of daily periodicity in the environment. For example, does the wind at the SouthWest Rift Zone die down at night? If so it might give us a hint about potential pollinators for the plant. It seems to us from casual observations that it is too windy most of the days for insects to be successful at getting from plant to plant.

We are also curious about the clouds that blow through the area. About half-way between the rain forest and the SW Rift Zone there are some trees that have "beards" of lichens. This looks to us like a response to getting moisture of clouds. There are often low-lying clouds in this area. Does the same thing happen at the SW Rift Zone? We have no idea. But if there is some moisture coming from the clouds, then this is perhaps not a desert at all. That is way we would like moisture sensors as part of our weather station.

The design, as we envision it, will be to measure the light (to detect clouds), temperature, moisture and wind at some 30 to 50 locations in the South West Rift zone in the area where there are Silene individuals. This is about 5 hectares in extent. There will then be a set of about 25 weather stations that will carry the signal to the Volcano Observatory. These will be sampling the gradient. Additionally, perhaps 10 more stations could be placed in the rain forest for a comparison.