Low-Cost IoT Remote Sensor Mesh for Large-Scale Orchard Monitorization

Abstract

Population growth and climate change lead agricultural cultures to face environmental degradation and rising of resistant diseases and pests. These conditions result in reduced product quality and increasing risk of harmful toxicity to human health. Thus, the prediction of the occurrence of diseases and pests and the consequent avoidance of the erroneous use of phytosanitary products will contribute to improving food quality and safety and environmental land protection. This study presents the design and construction of a low-cost IoT sensor mesh that enables the remote measurement of parameters of large-scale orchards. The developed remote monitoring system transmits all monitored data to a central node via LoRaWAN technology. To make the system nodes fully autonomous, the individual nodes were designed to be solar-powered and to require low energy consumption. To improve the user experience, a web interface and a mobile application were developed, which allow the monitored information to be viewed in real-time. Several experimental tests were performed in an olive orchard under different environmental conditions. The results indicate an adequate precision and reliability of the system and show that the system is fully adequate to be placed in remote orchards located at a considerable distance from networks, being able to provide real-time parameters monitoring of both tree and the surrounding environment.

The Prototype Monitoring System for Pollution Sensing and Online Visualization with the Use of a UAV and a WebRTC-Based Platform

“…The gaseous air pollutant most often measured by monitoring systems based on IoT devices is carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Often measured are also oxides of nitrogen [13,18,19] and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) [11,20].…”

“…Some IoT systems measure general air quality parameters, expressed by the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) indicator [11] or the Air Quality Index (AQI) [21]. For measurements of the concentration of gaseous air pollutants, low-cost sensors often are used [22], such as the Waveshare MQ-135 [12,20,23] and other sensors of the Waveshare MQ family [23,24], the Bosch BME680 [21,24], the Bosch BME688 [11], and the Sensirion SGP30 [11]. In the case of particulate matter, the PM2.5 is usually measured [18,19,21,[25][26][27], although some systems also measure PM10 [18,19,27,28] and PM1 [27].…”

“…The most often measured weather factors are ambient temperature and relative humidity. Sensors used for these measurements are the Bosch BME680 [21,24], the Bosch BME688 [11], the Adafruit DHT11 [12], the Sensirion SHT11 [20,23], and the SparkFun RHT03 [17]. If the Bosch BME680 and the Bosch BME688 are used, atmospheric pressure also can be measured [11,21,24].…”

Development of Technological Capabilities through the Internet of Things (IoT): Survey of Opportunities and Barriers for IoT Implementation in Portugal’s Agro-Industry

“…), and enables precision agriculture. Precision agriculture uses data-driven decisions with a base of information technology to ensure that crops and soil receive exactly what is necessary for optimum heathy and productivity [10,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Figure 1 summarizes most of the challenges in farming and livestock production, subdivided into monitoring, measuring, tracking, and controlling.…”

Real-Time Environmental Monitoring for Aquaculture Using a LoRaWAN-Based IoT Sensor Network

“…Additionally, these data could be used for future comparison under a changing climate. Real-time monitoring in agriculture and aquaculture is commonly employed to enhance farm management decisions [ 16 , 17 ]. However, the deployment of an environmental sensor network for monitoring estuaries presents several technical challenges that need to be addressed.…”