The Jefferson Project at Lake George, called
one of the most ambitious research projects
to deploy “big data” and analytics technology
to manage and protect a body of fresh water,
is entering a new phase in which enormous
amounts of data will be captured from sensors
and analyzed.
A collaboration between IBM Research,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the FUND
for Lake George, the Jefferson Project involves
more than 60 scientists from around the world
and IBM Research labs in Brazil, Ireland, Texas
and New York. The project is deploying Internet
of Things technology on a grand scale in conjunction
with research and experimentation
to understand the ecology of large lakes and
the impact of human activity, researchers said.
Scientists anticipate that insights uncovered
from the data collection and discovery stage
of the project will not only help manage and
protect one of America’s most famous lakes,
but create a blueprint to preserve important
lakes, rivers and other bodies of fresh water
around the globe.
The potential impact of these new developments
extends well beyond the shores of Lake
George. By capturing and pooling data from
all sorts of sensors and swiftly analyzing it,
scientists, policy makers and environmental
groups around the globe could soon accurately
predict how weather, contaminants, invasive
species and other threats might affect a lake’s
natural environment.
Armed with these new insights and a growing
body of best practices, corrective actions could
be taken in advance to protect fresh water
sources anywhere in the world.
The Jefferson Project is named after President
Thomas Jefferson, who described Lake
George as, “without comparison, the most
beautiful water I ever saw.” The three-year
initiative aims to establish one of the world’s
most sophisticated lake environmental monitoring
and prediction systems, giving scientists
and the community a real-time picture of the health of the lake.
Thirty-five years of monitoring the chemistry
and algae in Lake George by scientists at RPI’s
Darrin Fresh Water Institute, in collaboration
with the FUND for Lake George, have demonstrated
the lake is changing, according to
scientists. Chloride inputs from road salt have
tripled, algae have increased by one third, and
five invasive species have been introduced.
These factors threaten entire regional economies
driven by water recreation, boating and
other forms of tourism on fresh water lakes,
rivers and streams.
Officials said the new phase of the project
is the culmination of several milestones. An
array of sophisticated sensors of different
shapes and sizes, including underwater sonar
based sensors; customized software programs
and solar energy systems to power off-grid
equipment have now been deployed, tested
and refined. These enhancements have led
to greatly improved measurement data that
will be used to better understand the lake and
lead to improvements in the accuracy of four
predictive models built by IBM researchers
that precisely measure weather events, water
run-off from the surrounding mountains into
the lake, inputs of road salt to the lake, and
water circulation.
Even as the data collection and discovery
phase of the Jefferson Project ramps up, the
ambitious initiative has already offered intriguing
insights into Lake George. For example,
Lake George flows south to north, with the
lake draining into Lake Champlain via the La
Chute River. However, sensors deployed on the
lake bottom during the winter ice-over period
recently confirmed complicated flow patterns
within Lake George, scientists said.
The computing infrastructure powering the
Jefferson Project involves multiple computing
platforms, ranging from an IBM Blue Gene/Q
supercomputer located in a data center on
the RPI campus to embedded, intelligentcomputing
elements and other Internet of
Things technology situated on various sensor
platforms in and around the lake.
“The Jefferson Project provides the unique
opportunity for biologists and environmental
scientists to work closely with engineers, physicists,
computer scientists and meteorologists to
understand large lakes at a level of detail and intensity that is simply unprecedented,” said
Rick Relyea, project director. “Together, we will
make tremendous inroads into understanding
how lakes naturally behave and how human
activities alter biodiversity, the functioning
of freshwater ecosystems, and overall water
quality.”
“The world’s important bodies of fresh water
such as Lake George are precious to people, essential
to life and drive the economy, but they’re
under siege from a growing list of threats,”
said Harry Kolar, IBM engineer and associate
director of the project. “The key to protecting
this precious natural resource lies in the data,
and the stage is now set to discover a deluge of
insights about the delicate ecology of the lake
and the factors that threaten it. The results of
our efforts will help drive new ways to protect
bodies of fresh water around the world.”
“Never in the history of any freshwater lake
in the world has the caliber of science and
technology now being brought to Lake George
been applied for the purpose of sustaining
lake health, ‘from physics to fish,’ ” said Eric
Siy, executive director of the FUND for Lake
George. “The empowered science of The Jefferson
Project will empower people to ensure
the Lake is protected for future generations.”
The work of the Jefferson Project builds
on the findings from “The State of the Lake:
Thirty Years of Water Quality Monitoring on
Lake George, New York, 1980-2009,” a study
released in 2014 by RPI and the FUND for Lake
George. For the past 35 years, research on Lake
George was conducted manually, with scientists
laboriously collecting water samples by hand
for analysis in the lab.
Officials said now with the Jefferson Project,
this important work is being digitized and
accelerated, augmented with automated realtime
data monitoring via a customized network
of sensors that collect massive amounts of
information and transmit it to supercomputers
for analyses and modeling using sophisticated
3-D visualization technology.
The project is also developing new tools,
such as image recognition software that
identifies plankton from data collected via a
GPS-enabled towable camera, as well as stateof-
the-art data visualizations that bring new
data-driven discoveries to life for scientists,
tourists and local residents.
Photo Courtesy IBM