Polar Bears International watches over cell tower fuel cells with InterMapper network monitoring software
Customers: Robert Buchanan, President Daniel Zatz
Location: Churchill, Manitoba, Canada
Business: Polar Bears International (PBI) supports a wide variety of research and education projects that benefit the world's polar bears.
InterMapper's Role: InterMapper monitors radio tower fuel cells to ensure that power supplies will support the constant streaming of video, sound, conferencing, and text data that Polar Bear International distributes to scientists and classrooms around the world.
Quote: “Without InterMapper, we're in trouble.”
Every fall, the polar bears of the southern Artic Circle migrate south with the ice on the Western Hudson Bay. For a few weeks in October and November they move through Churchill, Manitoba making it a boom town for scientists and tourists who are eager to study and see the bears…before they are gone.
Many of the scientists in Churchill are supported by or working with Polar Bears International (PBI), an international non-profit organization that supports research and education programs focused on the world's polar bear population. Polar Bear International support comes in many forms: public awareness, fund-raising, and infrastructure.
Essential to all PBI operations and programs is it's wireless radio network that streams real-time video (Polar Bear Cam) to its own website and the National Geographic website, sound data to scientists at the San Diego Zoo and broadcasters in North America, video data to researchers in Florida, and text data to other scientists. Videoconferencing allows PBI to talk real-time to classrooms across the country as well as journalists around the world. And students on assignment with PBI use network resources to blog and post their work.
All that data is run over a network that relies on distributed radio repeater and network devices. “We have six links from Churchill that spread across the tundra,” explains Daniel Zatz, owner of SeeMore Wildlife Systems in Homer, Alaska, who donates time to PBI each year. “We have towers with point-to-point radios and other with Omni directional radios.”
Without a reliable network, the work of PBI-supported research and education programs that are planned every year would be impossible. Reliability is an issue for any network. It's especially tricky for a network made up of devices that are installed high on towers in the Artic Circle.
“Our towers are powered by methanol fuel cells,” explains Zatz. “The farthest tower at Cape Churchill supports three cameras that collect real time video data for researchers in Florida. If the radio links go down, the fuel cells and research programs are greatly harmed.”
Zatz and a team of other PBI volunteers spend six weeks with the bears in a vehicle called Buggy One, a Tundra Buggy provided by Frontiers North Adventures that is used as a photography studio-data collection center, and IT headquarters on wheels. When the ice is in, Buggy One or other vehicles can get Zatz and his colleagues to the towers. When the ice isn't in, a helicopter is needed. In any case, it's better to make a maintenance trip to refuel the cell or make repairs before the links go down and the education and research projects are interrupted.
That's where InterMapper comes in. “We use InterMapper to monitor the network and fuel cells on towers,” says Zatz. “We can query fuel cell status by converting serial data to IP, and we can easily monitor the status of the entire network. InterMapper tells us that cells are working and warns us if they're getting too cold. If anything is wrong, we can get to the tower and fix things without sacrificing research time.”
Time is an issue for PBI researchers and educators. First, Churchill provides the most accessible location for seeing polar bears in the wild. But the bears move through the area quickly once a year giving PBI programs about 6 weeks in which to accomplish a lot. Second, polar bear population is declining. They have been called the “canary in the coal mine” of global warming. As the polar cap melts, their numbers decrease. Time to study, understand, and learn from them in the warming Churchill environment is growing short.
“The ability to open polar observation study and education to people around the globe is essential to environmental conservation,” says Robert Buchanan, President of Polar Bears International. “We're working with researchers at the biggest zoos in the world and other research centers to provide real time data on polar bear migration, communication, diet and feeding, and population. Without the network, and without InterMapper, we're in trouble.”