Climate change is having profound impacts on ecological, agricultural and other societal systems. Quantifying climate change and its consequences has become a major focus of the physical and life sciences. Our knowledge of climatic changes, however, predominantly relies on a global network of official weather stations. Such weather stations are generally established in open landscapes where the wind mixes the air, above short grass and well away from trees. However, these data do not accurately reflect microclimates (defined as the thermal and hydric conditions in the immediate vicinity of organisms or ecosystem processes of interest, as driven by atmospheric conditions interacting with the abiotic and biotic components of the Earth's surface). Quantifying the true impact of climate change in forests, for instance, is only possible when taking the microclimate into account. To achieve a thorough assessment of its importance, a first step is to robustly and accurately quantify microclimate itself and make these data immediately available to end users. Therefore, an integrative device quantifying a suite of climatic conditions including temperature, light, and moisture is needed and these data need to be available in real time to stakeholders, the scientific community and society.
The objective of MIRRA is to develop a Microclimate Real-time Remote Applications (MIRRA) system, entirely open access and with open data. This system quantifies the microclimate in real-time and in remote locations (e.g. forests, arable fields, grasslands or mountains) and make the data automatically available. We specifically focused on a simple, low-cost, miniature self-assembly device that can function over long time periods (years) with automatic data upload into the cloud via a wireless designed for low-power usage.
