Many of us struggled with the heat waves in early July and mid-August. On days like these, the media increasingly offer health tips. But street trees also suffer stress, to stick with the initial example. If we knew that the soil was drying out extremely, we could counteract this with a bucket of water. Perhaps even in the front garden of a neighbour who is away on summer holiday.
It would be helpful to be able to check the environmental data for Kleve on a daily basis, if it were available locally, so that we could see that our own street is currently affected. Shivashish Pachauri and his team (environmental data team) are colleagues at a company that focuses on hardware solutions in the B2B sector. They applied for the Klever Birne 2025 award with their idea for a collaborative environmental data network in Kleve. Why the Klever Birne award in particular? Shivashish is a graduate of Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. Even though he successfully completed his mechatronics studies in 2024, he still has ties to Kleve.
Network and Data
The idea behind Team Umweltdaten is to place sensors at critical points and use a mesh network to collect and share environmental data such as temperature, humidity and air quality, soil moisture, water levels, UV index, and light. The key features are the sensors designed by the team and the mesh network.
Mesh refers to interlocking. Instead of requiring a gateway, or connection, for each individual sensor to transmit the collected data, as is common in other networks, the sensors in a mesh network are interconnected. This means they communicate with each other and only need a single gateway connected to the internet or a server to send the data and make it visible to users via a website or app.
A key advantage of this architecture is its high reliability: if individual nodes fail, the entire system remains functional because the data automatically finds alternative routes through the network, and only the failed nodes need to be replaced. Expanding the system is just as easy, as new nodes simply need to be switched on and placed in the desired position – the mesh network automatically recognizes them and integrates them seamlessly into the existing system. Since only a single gateway requires an Internet connection, all other nodes save both costs and energy, as they do not need their own mobile phone contracts or energy-intensive Internet connections and simply forward their data from node to node to the gateway.
The team wants to start with 25 sensors at drought-stressed locations and as flood monitoring points on the Rhine and Niers rivers. This will be followed by a community expansion: for 50 euros, neighborhood groups, individual citizens, institutions, and other groups can purchase and install sensors. “The more sensors there are, the more accurate the information that is made available to everyone,” explain Shivashish and his colleagues. They emphasize that the environmental data network is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant: ‘We do not collect or transmit any personal data; only anonymous environmental measurements are shared.’
Community outside the data cloud
For Shivashish and the team ABECO, the environmental data network is an example of innovative environmental democracy. Citizens get direct access to real-time data about their immediate surroundings. Thinking bigger, the environmental data doesn’t have to stay in Kleve, but can be used for cross-border cooperation with Dutch communities. The team is also open to providing the data for HSRW research projects. Für Shivashish und sein Team ist das Umweltdatennetzwerk ein Beispiel für innovative Umweltdemokratie. Bürger*innen erhalten direkten Zugang zu Echtzeitdaten über ihre unmittelbare Umgebung. Denkt man größer, so müssen die Umweltdaten nicht in Kleve bleiben, sondern können für grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit mit niederländischen Gemeinschaften genutzt werden. Auch für die Bereitstellung der Daten für Forschungsprojekte der HSRW ist das Team offen.
`Our environmental data network supports people in taking environmental responsibility and becoming active participants in climate adaptation. Take street trees, for example: in periods of extreme drought, neighbours can get together to form emergency irrigation teams, share their garden hoses and coordinate watering schedules.’
The hoped-for side effect: a long-term change in behaviour across all demographic groups. After all, anyone who joins an emergency irrigation team automatically engages with the issue of water scarcity and drought and may begin to consider their own water consumption.
Curious? View individual introductions to this year’s finalists here on our website or on our social media channels in the coming weeks leading up to the Klever Birne award ceremony on 11 September 2025 and find out more. Admission to the award ceremony is free of charge, but registration is requested.
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