Sentinel: Intelligent Information Sharing for Controlling the Emerald Ash Borer Threat

The Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) has killed or infested millions of ash trees in Michigan and is fast spreading to neighboring states. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that if EAB went unchecked in the rest of the country, the loss to the nation could range from $20 billion to $60 billion. One key requirement for the success of EAB containment programs is the underlying information sharing infrastructure. EAB partners are maintaining Web sites to publish information about the borer. However, this approach for sharing information is ad hoc and requires intensive human intervention. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented infrastructure, called Sentinel, for the intelligent and timely sharing of EAB-related information