Reinventing Water-Landscape Monitoring and Management in the Age of Geoenabled Environmental Sensor Webs and Social Networks

Future humans interacting with water in Kentucky will bring to their experience not only the panoply of expectations, assumptions, background knowledge, and past experiences but also ultra-smart gadgetry which will shape the outcome of the event. The technoscapes inhabited by human communities and individuals are over imposed on the natural rhythms which hydrology obeys, providing opportunities for sensorial fusion. An ongoing evolutionary explosion in diversity, mobility and interconnectedness of sensors is manifesting itself as the Internet of Things, all denizens of the “Cloud”, allowing the citizen scientist to easily generate georeferenced sensor information. This augmented, hybrid sensorial ecosystem challenges us to rethink how we tap into big data, mostly unstructured, representing the status of water systems, and how we extract relevant information.