Workshop: Engineering & Biology at the Frontier of Environmental and Organismal Sensing' Fall, 2014, Washington, D.C.

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

An award is made to the University of California Davis to host a workshop with engineers and biologists from academia, industry, and government agencies. The ability to monitor free-living, wild organisms using very small, automated sensing devices will revolutionize our understanding of animal movement patterns and their physiological responses to environmental cues such as predators and weather. Monitoring animals while keeping investigators at a distance ensures minimal interference with the animals' behavior. Although many sensing-device technologies exist, insufficient collaboration between biologists and engineers currently limits development of novel solutions to many pressing biological questions. Participants in this workshop will develop a dialogue between disciplines to generate novel, transformative technologies for the monitoring of organisms in their environments. The inclusion of industry representatives will help address the often fatal gap between prototype development and production. Holding the workshop in Washington, D. C. will allow D.C-based departments, agencies, and foundations that are promoting and funding multi-disciplinary projects to attend as observers and to consider ways in which they could enable production solutions. The workshop is designed to impact, both directly and indirectly, a broad spectrum of science, education, industry, government, and society. Development, production, and application of new technologies will give us powerful new tools for understanding global climate change, biology (with potential biomedical applications), and data capture and conveyance. Many of the technologies likely to result from closer collaborations between engineers and biologists are ideally suited for use in K-12, university, and citizen computer-based learning, allowing participants to track animals and their environments in near real-time. The needs of other governmental institutions, such as Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense, will likely overlap with those of academics and private entities and be addressed by the workshop.