The Boise State Center for Environmental Sensing and Inland Northwest Research Alliance co-sponsored the  Symposium for Environmental Sensing on the Boise State campus on October 25-26, 2007. Click here for the symposium brochure. The focus of this meeting was on development of new sensor technology and use of sensors and sensor systems to acquire information about the movement of nutrients, water, contaminants, and chemical and biological threats in the environment. Papers submitted by presenters were published in peer-reviewed proceedings. Click here for the proceedings.

Our keynote speaker for this event was Dr. Gary Sayler, Director of the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Institute for Biological Sciences. He is the Beaman Distinguished Professor of Microbiology, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Dr. Sayler has 32 years of experience in multidisciplinary laboratory and field environmental research and biodegradation of organic pollutants such as polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and trichloroethylene. Over the past 20 years, he has pioneered the development of environmental molecular diagnostics including the extraction and analysis of nucleic acids from soils, bioluminescent reporter technology, and performed the first field release of a genetically-engineered microorganism for environmental sensing and bioremediation. Dr. Sayler is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and an Associate Editor of Environmental Science and Technology. He serves on EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors and the Scientific Advisory Board, holds 10 patents, and has nearly 300 publications. Dr. Sayler's presentation was a great talk on the use of bioluminescent bioreporters for environmental sensing.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Jörg Imberger is the Director at the Centre for Water Research and Vice-Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His main research interest is in the motion and mixing in lakes, estuaries and coastal seas in response to both natural forces such as tides, meteorological surface fluxes, river inflows and outflows as well as anthropogenic forcings and mechanical mixers and the effect of such motions and mixing on ecological systems residing in the water bodies. Dr. Imberger is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the US National Academy of Engineering. He was also awarded the 2007 ASLO AC Redfield Lifetime Achievement for his work on physical limnology. In 1996 he was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, and received the Onassis Prize for the Environment in 1995 for his contributions to environmental issues. Dr. Imberger continues to work in the area of water quality management in lakes, rivers and estuaries. He leads a field operations group, a modeling group and a contract research group that  provide the research community and industry worldwide with state-of-the-art instrumentation and models for monitoring water bodies to support implementation of effective and sustainable water management strategies. Dr. Imberger's very engaging presentation on real-time, self-learning river basin management systems may be viewed at http://www.cwr.uwa.edu.au/news/pastpresentations.php.

Technical Sessions were held in following areas of sensor development, research and application:

1. Watershed Instrumentation/Sensing (chaired by Jim McNamara, BSU): Novel uses of sensors and sensor networks for monitoring hydrologic stores and fluxes in watersheds, incorporating sensor networks into hydrologic databases, and the implementation of regional hydrologic observatories.

2. Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensor Applications (chaired by Michael Young, Desert Research Institute, Las Vegas, NV): Use of moisture and temperature sensors and sensor networks for hydrologic and engineering applications.

3. Biological Environmental Sensors (chaired by Kevin Feris, BSU): The development, testing, and validation of biologically-based environmental sensors.  

4. Detection and Characterization of Microbes and the Processes they Mediate in Complex Environmental Niches (chaired by Andrzej Paszczynski, University of Idaho and Gary Sayler, University of Tennessee): Ecoproteomic, ecogenomic, and other novel methods and tools that can be used to sense and characterize microorganisms and microbiological processes within natural and anthropogenic environments will be explored. Such tools allow as never before investigations of ecosystems at the “global” level, giving insight into environmental processes both the metagenomic and meaproteomic scales. Speakers will discuss some of the challenges and recent successes of these innovative methods in the study of complex natural and human-altered ecosystems.