Abstract
Environmental monitoring in ecological and hydrological watershed-scale research is an important and promising area of application for wireless sensor networks. This paper presents the system design of the IPv6 wireless sensor network (IPv6WSN) in the Heihe River watershed in the Gansu province of China to assist ecological and hydrological scientists collecting field scientific data in an extremely harsh environment. To solve the challenging problems they face, this paper focuses on the key technologies adopted in our project, metadata modeling for the IPv6WSN. The system design introduced in this paper provides a solid foundation for effective use of a self-developed IPv6 wireless sensor network by ecological and hydrological scientists.