There's some testing to see how covering open irrigation canals with solar panels which would reduce evaporation and generate power
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
As you noted, in the US, 3G and older cellular modems aren't usable.
For current cellular technology, the keywords to look for are LTE-M [0] and NB-IoT [1]. Most of these types of dev boards aren't cheap. Particle makes a 65 USD board [2] and they seem to have a free tier for cellular data access.
There's a ~$90 million wildlife crossing that started construction earlier this year in Agoura Hills, CA [1] where apparently many mountain lions try to cross.
It wouldn't have helped P22 since there's many roads and freeways in the 30 miles between Griffith Park, where P22 lived, and Agoura Hills but there's some progress in helping mountain lions in the area.
After issues using various (cheap) USB 1Gbps ethernet adapters and an Intel MBP, I ended up getting one that uses a RTL8156B and seems ok. These are 2.5Gb adapters that use NCM driver so shouldn't cause high CPU.
I don't have 2.5Gb network equipment but have tested with iperf between and get around like 900 Mbps and no high CPU, unlike noticeable CPU usage with the cheap 1Gbps USB adapters that use ECM drivers
This makes me think of of the Amazon Dash button which had a microphone [0] that would listen for ultrasound emitted from your phone to configure wifi credentials.
In the USA, some states (including California) and private health care providers are using something called Smart Health Card [0] which is a signed JWT using public/private keys.
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/solar-panel-cove...