FPSP 2015 - Workshop on Jordan Funded Peer-Science Projects

USAID, in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), have launched Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) Science. PEER Science is a competitive grants program that invites scientists in developing countries to apply for funds to support research and capacity-building activities on topics of importance to USAID and conducted in partnership with their NSF-funded collaborators.
This workshop aims at serving as a meeting point and a forum for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences among researchers who have projects funded from PEER Science Program and representatives from USAID.
Jordan University of Science and Technology PEER project "Evaluating climate change impacts on the arid lands and water resources in Jordan" aims at developing foundations, principles, and metrics to assess vulnerability, impacts, problems, and variations to climate change in the arid and semi-arid lands of Jordan. Based on the assessment foundations, we hope that the project will build comprehensive and integrated assessment models for the impacts of climate change on arid lands, vegetation, animal and species diversity and distribution, water resources, hydrology, land topography, and pollution, as well as human adaptations to these changes. The study also aims to build an environmental monitoring infrastructure to collect environmental data from the targeted landscapes. These collected data will subsequently be used with various other data sources such as satellite images, sensor networks, pollution statistics, and historical data sets to build environmental assessment models.
A team from Yarmouk University will present his research project entitled "Optimizing Water Usage of Irrigation systems using Wireless Sensor Networks in Jordan". The aim of this project is to develop an automatic irrigation system by using Wireless Sensor Network in order to optimize the water usage in agriculture sector. Besides, the project aims to analyze water usages data using data mining techniques to extract operational patterns for plants' water consumption that could be used to enhance the irrigation process. The team will present the network architecture, the technology used, and experiment they are planning to perform to measure the effectiveness of the system.