FOSS4G BASED HIGH FREQUENCY AND INTEROPERABLE LAKE WATER-QUALITY MONITORING SYSTEM

Abstract. Climate, together with human activities, is changing the natural dynamics in lake ecosystems and adding new challenges to the management of water resources. Recent studies on Lake Lugano, in Switzerland, showed for instance that the increased water temperature influence other processes such as lake stratification and mixing dynamics, algal blooms, colonisation by alien species, affecting the lake ecosystem as a whole. In such situation, real-time systems with high frequency measurements, together with the traditional discrete monitoring, can help in understanding dynamics and processes occurring on short time scales. To this aim, an open monitoring system largely composed by open source components is being developed for the high frequency monitoring of Lake Lugano. The system relies on the open source software istSOS either on the server and node sides applying the edge computing paradigm which is more and more adopted in the Internet of Things field. The implementation collects temperature and dissolved oxygen data from sensors positioned at six different depths of the lake and transmits them using the LoRa radio frequency to a data warehouse. At server side, the software architecture adopts the evolving technology based on containers where services can be grouped in a compose and easily deployed on a server. This paper aims to describe the adopted open source technology and demonstrate that it can be successfully used also in environmental monitoring where the accessibility is limited and the weather conditions can be unpredictable.