This paper is concerned with the application of

wireless sensor network (WSN) technology to long-duration

and large-scale environmental monitoring. The holy grail is a

system that can be deployed and operated by domain spe-

cialists not engineers, but this remains some distance into the

future. We present our views as to why this field has progressed

less quickly than many envisaged it would over a decade ago.

We use real examples taken from our own work in this field to

illustrate the technological difficulties and challenges that are

entailed in meeting end-user requirements for information

gathering systems. Reliability and productivity are key con-

cerns and influence the design choices for system hardware

and software. We conclude with a discussion of long-term

challenges for WSN technology in environmental monitoring

and outline our vision of the future