UEN and Partners Will Drive Innovation in Environmental Research

The Utah Education Network (UEN) is collaborating with a multi-state group on an exciting new initiative, the WildWEST project (Wild-area-networks Wireless Enabling Science Team).

Backed by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, this project will enhance and expand environmental research in the western U.S. It’s a team effort, led by the Nevada System of Higher Education’s NevadaNet and working closely with UEN and Arizona’s Sun Corridor Network (SCN).

Their goal? To tackle the digital connectivity challenges that come with conducting science in remote, rugged areas — places where gathering real-time data is critical for wildfire tracking, snow monitoring, water management and wildlife and climate studies, but where digital connectivity has been a serious issue. That’s where UEN’s technology infrastructure comes in.

“UEN’s expertise in designing infrastructure and boosting connectivity is critical in these tough-to-reach places,” explained Jim Stewart, UEN’s chief technology officer and co-principal investigator of WildWEST. Stewart also highlighted that another purpose of the program is “to train a new generation of technical science facilitators.”

Over the next five years, WildWEST will train field engineers and internet-of-things specialists in Nevada, Utah and Arizona. This means not only boosting the region’s research outputs but also creating job opportunities in the tech and science sectors. UEN’s involvement will ensure that the new recruits are ready to tackle the demands of fieldwork in remote areas.

UEN, along with the University of Utah Center for High-Performance Computing (CHPC), is also helping set up a cross-state field networks testbed — a shared collection of sites for researchers and the WildWEST team to collaborate on technology designs and share real-time environmental data more easily. This operational testbed is intended as a model for other projects around the country, showing how regional partnerships across political and administrative borders can push technology and useful science outputs forward.

“Since field research doesn't care about political boundaries such as state borders,” said Joe Breen, one of the WildWEST co-principal investigators and IT architect at CHPC, “the collaborations of the regional networks enable both people-networking and technology-networking opportunities to reach between field stations and remote sites.”

The WildWEST project is paving the way for the future of environmental science at universities in the western U.S., with UEN providing ground-level expertise and support. From advancing technology to training the workforce of tomorrow, UEN’s contributions are making science in remote areas more connected, efficient and effective.

About UEN | UETN: UEN is part of the Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN), which is responsible for a robust infrastructure of broadband and broadcast technologies for education and telehealth in Utah. An innovator in broadband and broadcast delivery of statewide educational and telehealth resources, UETN connects Utah school districts, schools, higher education institutions and libraries to high-quality educational resources.