—Anomaly detection is an important challenge for tasks such as fault diagnosis and intrusion detection in energy constrained wireless sensor networks. A key problem is how to minimise the communication overhead in the network while performing in-network computation when detecting anomalies. Our approach to this problem is based on a formulation that uses distributed, one-class quarter-sphere support vector machines to identify anomalous measurements in the data. We demonstrate using sensor data from the Great Duck Island Project that our distributed approach is energy efficient in terms of communication overhead while achieving comparable accuracy to a centralised scheme.