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Motivated by the needs of precise forest inventory and real-time surveillance for ecosystem management, in this paper we present GreenOrbs [2], a wireless sensor network system and its application for canopy closure estimates. Both the hardware and software designs of GreenOrbs are tailored for sensing in wild environments without human supervision, including a firm weatherproof enclosure of sensor motes and a light-weight mechanism for node state monitoring and data collection. By incorporating a pre-deployment training process as well as a distributed calibration method, the estimates of canopy closure stay accurate and consistent against uncertain sensory data and dynamic environments. We have implemented a prototype system of GreenOrbs and carried out multiple rounds of deployments. The evaluation results demonstrate that GreenOrbs outperforms the conventional approaches for canopy …