— We present a practical distributed source coding scheme for deployable wireless sensor networks. To the best of our knowledge it is the first-of-its-kind practical scheme implemented and evaluated in time-varying environments. The solution developed is particularly appropriate for monitoring and surveillance applications in which energy consumption and bandwidth usage are of paramount importance. We also report on the entropy tracking algorithm based on varying spatial correlations and adaptive code rate assignments. The performance results obtained from the experiments show the promises of practical distributed source coding in the sensor network context.