What is Forest Observatory

Forest Observatory is a Linked Datastore that integrates heterogeneous data. We consider Forest Observatory as an extension of Urban Observatories which aim at gathering real-time urban data across cities. Collecting data in forests is much more challenging than in cities due to the lack of infrastructure. However, while we expect to deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to enable poaching monitoring, we should utilise already collected data sets to develop poaching predictive models. For example, DGFC has data sets collected by researchers for wildlife species monitoring over the last decade, such as animal collar data, camera traps, satellite imagery, LiDAR and environmental data, with each data set generated using different time frames, durations, geographic areas.

To develop a Forest Observatory, we aim to integrate various data sets collected by the bioscience researchers at DGFC into a unified linked data store. We use semantic data integration techniques while conforming to the data modelling standards (e.g., ontologies) and needs of bioscience research --towards developing a model and novel tools that are exportable to other world areas where poaching is a threat to wildlife conservation.