Soil Sensors and Plant Wearables for Smart and Precision Agriculture

Abstract

a compelling need to utilize advanced technologies in the agriculture sector to increase agricultural productivity and reduce food losses to guarantee food security. [2] In this regard, "smart agriculture" or "precision agriculture" has been attracting increasing attention due to its capability for using less to grow more compared to traditional agricultural practices. In addition, it improves the quality of the work environment and social aspects of farming, ranching, and other relevant professions. [4] Smart agriculture comprises a set of technologies that combines sensors, information systems, enhanced machinery, and informed management to optimize production by accounting for variabilities and uncertainties within sustainable agricultural systems. [3][4][5] Among the set of technologies, advanced sensing systems that monitor soil health and conditions and crop developments are of paramount importance because they collect and evaluate critical data for decision making and management, especially when crop growth conditions vary considerably over space and time. Spatial variation may result from soil properties, diseases, weeds, pests, and previous land management. In particular, some soil properties (e.g., moisture, pH, nutrients) and plant diseases may form long-term spatial patterns. Temporal variability arises from weather patterns and management practices. In summary, the soil properties relevant to crop growth include a range of soil conditions including soil gas, moisture, temperature, nutrients, pH, and pollutants in the soil (Figure 1). [6,7] Monitoring the soil conditions will provide key information not only to improve resource utilization to maximize farming outputs and minimize environmental side effects but also to build site-specific databases of relationships between soil conditions and plant growth for intelligent and sustainable agriculture systems. Traditionally, soil properties are measured by soil sampling and offsite laboratory analysis or by on-site measurement to provide an extensive knowledge of soil information. [8] Seasonally varying crop growth conditions, such as water stress, lack of nutrients, diseases, weeds, and insects, are evaluated by visual inspection and laboratory analysis of plant tissues. The relatively periodically coarse sampling/measurement rate of these conventional strategies may not be sufficient to reveal variation at the appropriate spatial and temporal resolution. Novel technologies for collecting soil information with sufficient spatiotemporal resolutions are in demand to build efficient smart or precision agriculture systems. With the Soil sensors and plant wearables play a critical role in smart and precision agriculture via monitoring real-time physical and chemical signals in the soil, such as temperature, moisture, pH, and pollutants and providing key information to optimize crop growth circumstances, fight against biotic and abiotic stresses, and enhance crop yields. Herein, the recent advances of the important soil sensors in agricultural applications, in...

Toward the Next Generation of Digitalization in Agriculture Based on Digital Twin Paradigm

“…Digital technologies are supporting scientists to better understand and study soil in agriculture. Soil monitoring sensors such as moisture, temperature, organic matter, and soil pollutant sensors are playing critical roles in digital agriculture [49]. For instance, soil moisture information can be used to assess irrigation efficiency in agricultural fields [50].…”

Emerging Wearable Sensors for Plant Health Monitoring

“…Wearable electronics are promising for plant health monitoring due to the remarkable sensing resolution, accessibility, and continuous in-situ measurement. [36][37][38][39]42] By rapidly detecting the status of the plant health with wearable electronics in real-time, it is possible to detect plant diseases or abnormal conditions at a much earlier stage, and therefore reduce the crop loss of the agricultural industry in the future.…”

“…For example, roots absorb water and nutrients from the soil, while stems uptake and transport water and minerals from the root to leaf. [38,39] Processes of plant gas exchanges, including various volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), oxygen (O 2 ), and water vapor, take place through functional pores on the leaf surface, called stomata. [40,41] Therefore, plant health monitoring can be achieved by tracking the various biological processes, as mentioned above.…”

“…[36] For plant health monitoring, an ideal sensor can be simply placed and attached to different parts of plants, such as roots, stems, or leaves. [37,38] Each organ of the plant possesses different functions for maintaining plant health. For example, roots absorb water and nutrients from the soil, while stems uptake and transport water and minerals from the root to leaf.…”

Distance-Entropy: An Effective Indicator for Selecting Informative Data

“…Smart agriculture is established based on the digital process, combining the data in the agricultural field and the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) (Friha et al, 2021 ; Sun et al, 2021 ). As for the intelligent plant protection, the related data have various sources, such as the sensing of soil (Yin et al, 2021 ), light intensity (Yu et al, 2021 ), water stress (Mundim and Pringle, 2018 ; Ihuoma and Madramootoo, 2019 ), mixture of water and fertilizer (Jia et al, 2019 ), temperature and humidity (Mekala and Viswanathan, 2019 ), etc. However, more commonly used data sources in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven applications are images or videos.…”