The goal of the Virginia ECOCAM is to "bring the environment into the classroom" by providing students with images from wild and remote places in Virginia. These are places where it would be difficult or impossible to arrange a field trip and where the presence of so many students would disrupt the landscape. By using web cameras we are able to take students to these exotic locations without disturbing the species that naturally occur there.

The Virginia ECOCAM was funded by a grant from the Virginia Environmental Endowment through a grant to the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences.

The data/images from the barrier islands off the Virginia Coast come to your classroom via a spread-spectrum wireless network to Oyster, VA, where it is placed onto the conventional Internet. From there the images travel to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA where this web server is located.

In specific a 900 MHz wireless bridge connects a tower at Broadwater, VA on Hog Island to our lab in Oyster - a distance of approximately 15 miles. From the tower on southern Hog Island 802.11b wireless ethernet are used to connect to a relay station on northern Hog Island and to individual webcams which may be up to 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) away.

You can contact us care of:

Dr. David E. Smith
291 McCormick Road
P.O. Box 400123
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4123

Phone: 434-982-3049 and 434-924-7761
Fax: 434-982-2137
email: des3e@virginia.edu