Earth Pulse is a growing network of hyperlocal environmental observatories — each one listening to a forest, a hill, a wetland, continuously, for years. Node 001 is at Baner Hill, Pune, on the edge of the Western Ghats. It has been running since January 2022.
To build a nationwide network of hyperlocal, continuously operating environmental observatories — each one producing a long-term, freely accessible record of what a place sounds like, how its air quality changes, which species live there, and how the climate is shifting.
Most environmental data is regional and aggregated. Earth Pulse is hyperlocal and hourly. The goal is to reveal patterns that regional data cannot — the morning AQI spike before traffic, the exact temperature when the first monsoon cloud arrives, the dawn chorus shifting as seasons change, the plants that anchor a hill's ecology.
Over time, each node becomes more than data. It becomes memory, evidence, and a foundation for understanding how a place changes — accessible not just to researchers, but to the communities that live there.
Baner Hill sits at 560 metres on the eastern edge of the Western Ghats — a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Earth's eight biodiversity hotspots. These mountains are older than the Himalayas, hold 30% of India's plant and animal species within less than 6% of its land area, and are monitored by almost no one at the hyperlocal level.
Baner is where the city meets the Sahyadri. On one side: Pune's fastest-growing suburb, with traffic, construction, and rising temperatures. On the other: a forested hill where bee-eaters nest, Indian rollers flash overhead, and the monsoon arrives two days before the city centre. Earth Pulse sits exactly at that edge — recording both worlds, every hour.
Earth Pulse is the first continuous, open, citizen-science environmental observatory on this edge — recording air quality, hyperlocal weather, acoustic bird diversity, plant life, and soundscape health since January 2022.
Most environmental monitoring moves fast and wide — snapshots from satellites, monthly averages, data that tells you a region is changing but cannot tell you when, or exactly how, or what it sounded like when it did.
Earth Pulse moves slowly and deep. The same sensors, the same location, every hour, for years. That consistency is what allows a question like "has the monsoon been arriving later since 2022?" or "does bird activity drop when AQI crosses 60?" to have a real answer — grounded in local data, not extrapolated from somewhere else.
Sustained attention to one place is its own kind of science — and its own kind of care. Every reading logged is a small act of paying attention to something that most people pass on the way to somewhere else.
The most significant readings in our dataset since January 2022. Register free to access the full records table.
Every stream of data tells a different story about the same hill. Together they form a portrait of an ecosystem, continuously, over years.
Earth Pulse is one of the few hyperlocal sites that combines live sensors with 45 years of ERA5 reanalysis — the global gold standard climate dataset used by IPCC researchers. Temperature trends, monsoon history, decade comparisons, El Niño impacts — all for this exact location at 18.55°N 73.78°E.
Explore the data yourself: Temperature · Rainfall · Air Quality · Birds · Baner Hill · Climate History · Data Explorer →
Since October 2025, temperature, humidity, wind, and rainfall are sourced from Weather Union station ZWL008983 — a physical AWS sensor 2 km from Baner Hill, logged every 15 minutes. Before October 2025, Open-Meteo ECMWF provides the historical baseline.
Why this matters: Regional weather models can be off by 3–4°C for microclimates at the Western Ghats edge. A physical sensor 2 km away is significantly more accurate for Baner's conditions.
Hourly AQI from two independent sources. Copernicus CAMS via Open-Meteo provides EU AQI (0–100) with PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, ozone, CO, SO₂, and ammonia — the dataset used by European environmental agencies. Google Air Quality API provides India AQI (0–500) using India's CPCB pollutant weighting. Both stored side by side since January 2022. The two scales are never mixed or converted.
BirdNET v2.4 by Cornell Lab of Ornithology runs continuously on two Raspberry Pi nodes — one east-facing toward the Sahyadri foothills, one south-facing toward Baner Hill directly. Each detection is logged with confidence score and matched to the climate reading at that exact hour, enabling correlations between air quality, weather, and bird presence that single-node monitoring cannot provide.
The Normalised Difference Soundscape Index measures biophony against anthrophony in the audio spectrum — updated continuously from the south-facing node. The Baner Hill Bioacoustic Index aggregates NDSI, species richness, and detection frequency into a weekly 0–100 score, making long-term ecosystem health trends legible at a glance.
ERA5 is the ECMWF global climate reanalysis dataset — the gold standard used by IPCC researchers worldwide. Earth Pulse integrates ERA5 data from 1980 through 2021 with live sensor readings from January 2022 onward, creating a continuous climate record for this exact location spanning over four decades. Temperature trends, monsoon history, El Niño signatures — all at 18.55°N 73.78°E.
Photos submitted via identify.html are processed through PlantNet (trained on 50,000+ plant species), cross-referenced with Trefle for botanical metadata, and enriched by Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite for a conservation profile specific to the Western Ghats. Submissions within 10 km of Baner Hill are automatically added to the hill_trees database.
Baner Hill's canopy health is tracked via Normalised Difference Vegetation Index from Landsat (annual, 1990–2022) and Sentinel-2 (weekly, 2023+). NDVI above 0.45 indicates healthy canopy. The 1990 baseline enables three decades of comparison — showing how the hill has changed at the edge of Pune's expansion.
Gaps from power outages are automatically backfilled on the next run using archive APIs. The database uses upsert logic — re-running any script never creates duplicates. All data stored with IST (+05:30) timestamps. The combined_readings view merges Weather Union and Open-Meteo, with WU taking priority. All large tables are paginated — no silent truncation.
Two Raspberry Pis, two USB microphones, and a lot of Python. Monthly running cost: around ₹40 in electricity. All cloud infrastructure either free-tier or minimal cost. The entire system is designed to be reproducible — which is the foundation of the node network.
Earth Pulse is a long-term project. Each phase adds a new dimension of measurement or network capability.
All Earth Pulse data is freely available for research, journalism, education, and personal use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may use, share, and adapt the data for any purpose — including commercial — with attribution. The data is open. The platform is not.
Research collaboration, press enquiries, or data access: [email protected] · Host or sponsor a node →
Every forest, lake, and hill has a story — in the birds that appear at dawn, in the air quality before and after rain, in the temperature difference between a canopied trail and an open road. Earth Pulse makes that story legible, in real time, continuously, for years.
Every hour, your node records and publishes the following — automatically, without anyone needing to touch it.
All of this is published live at your node's own page on earth-pulse.org — visible to anyone, searchable, downloadable by researchers. Your community's data, in the open, permanently.
We flash the SD card, configure the software, and test everything before it reaches you. When it arrives, you plug in the power cable, plug in the USB microphone, connect to your WiFi, and it begins transmitting within minutes.
We are accepting a small number of node applications. Each location is reviewed to ensure the microphone has meaningful outdoor exposure and the community has the intention to keep the node running long-term.
You have a location — a forest edge, a farm, a lakeside property, a campus, a wildlife corridor — with an outdoor space, power, and WiFi. We provide the hardware kit, pre-configured and tested. You plug it in. The data is yours and the world's.
Know a community, forest, school, or nature reserve that would benefit from an Earth Pulse node but cannot afford one? Sponsor covers the hardware cost and a period of running costs. The node is deployed, the data is open, and the community gets a permanent environmental record.
Earth Pulse is being designed as a nationwide network of hyperlocal environmental observatories. A forest, a hill, a lake, a university campus — each becomes a node with its own identity and its own live data. Together, these nodes will create one of the largest long-term, community-driven environmental datasets in India.
Each node gets its own address on the network — in.earth-pulse.org/pu/baner for Baner, and so on for every location. The main site shows what the network sees, together. Every node retains its own identity, its own community, and its own permanent record.
The first Earth Pulse observatory. The network is open — the next node could be a forest edge in Coorg, a farm in Nashik, a wetland in Bharatpur, or a university campus anywhere in India.
We review every application and reply within a few days. Write directly to or use the form below.
Questions about Earth Pulse, the node network, hosting, and the data.