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Sensor-Based Systems for Agriculture and Environmental Monitoring

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 8844

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Lorena Parra

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Guest Editor

Research Institute for Integrated Management of Coastal Areas (IGIC), Universitat Politècnica de València, 46730 Grau de Gandia, Spain
Interests: environmental monitoring; precision agriculture; image processing; crop management; smart cities; physical sensors
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The digital revolution and the advances in sensing technologies are promoting the emergence of new systems and applications for environment observation. The monitoring of agriculture might be one of the key areas of this technological revolution. Nonetheless, other areas such as pollution monitoring, detection of wildfires, or natural species monitoring are benefiting from these new sensing technologies. In the sensor-based systems for environmental monitoring, some aspects such as energy efficiency, wireless connectivity, or robust elements must be considered.

This Special Issue will address all types of applications and developments in sensor-based systems for environmental monitoring. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Sensor design and development;
Wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring;
Protocols and algorithms for energy efficiency;
Edge computing;
Low-cost and low-maintenance sensors;
Flora and fauna monitoring;
Natural disaster monitoring;
Agriculture 4.0;
Fault tolerance protocols and algorithms.

Dr. Lorena Parra
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

wireless sensor network
precision agriculture
physical sensor
smart protocols and algorithms
environmental observation

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

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25 pages, 3708 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mobility of LoRaWAN Gateways for Efficient Environmental Monitoring in Pristine Sites

by Salma Sobhi, Ahmed Elzanaty, Mohamed Y. Selim, Atef M. Ghuniem and Mohamed F. Abdelkader

Sensors 2023, 23(3), 1698; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s23031698 - 03 Feb 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2220

Abstract

Environmental monitoring of delicate ecosystems or pristine sites is critical to their preservation. The communication infrastructure for such monitoring should have as little impact on the natural ecosystem as possible. Because of their wide range capabilities and independence from heavy infrastructure, low-power wide area network protocols have recently been used in remote monitoring. In this regard, we propose a mobile vehicle-mounted gateway architecture for IoT data collection in communication-network-free areas. The limits of reliable communication are investigated in terms of gateway speed, throughput, and energy consumption. We investigate the performance of various gateway arrival scenarios, focusing on the trade-off between freshness of data, data collection rate, and end-node power consumption. Then we validate our findings using both real-world experiments and simulations. In addition, we present a case study exploiting the proposed architecture to provide coverage for Wadi El-Gemal national park in Egypt. The results show that reliable communication is achieved over all spreading factors (

SFs

) for gateway speeds up to 150 km/h with negligible performance degradation at

SFs = 11, 12

at speeds more than 100 km/h. The synchronized transmission model ensures the best performance in terms of throughput and power consumption at the expense of the freshness of data. Nonsynchronized transmission allows time-flexible data collection at the expense of increased power consumption. The same throughput as semisynchronized transmission is achieved using four gateways at only five times the energy consumption, while a single gateway requires seventeen times the amount of energy. Furthermore, increasing the number of gateways to ten increases the throughput to the level achieved by the synchronized scenario while consuming eight times the energy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor-Based Systems for Agriculture and Environmental Monitoring)

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15 pages, 4401 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Low-Cost Luxometer Benchmark for Solar Illuminance Measurement System Based on the Internet of Things

by Omar Guillán Lorenzo, Andrés Suárez-García, David González Peña, Manuel García Fuente and Diego Granados-López

Sensors 2022, 22(19), 7107; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22197107 - 20 Sep 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1739

Abstract

Natural illumination has an important place in home automation applications. Among other advantages, it contributes to better visual health, energy savings, and lower CO₂ emissions. Therefore, it is important to measure illuminance in the most accurate and cost-effective way. This work compares several low-cost commercial sensors (VEML 7700, TSL2591, and OPT3001) with a professional one (ML-020S-O), all of them installed outdoors. In addition, a platform based on the Internet of Things technology was designed and deployed as a centralized point of data collection and processing. Summer months have been chosen for the comparison. This is the most adverse situation for low-cost sensors since they are designed for indoor use, and their operating range is lower than the maximum reached by sunlight. The solar illuminance was recorded every minute. As expected, the obtained bias depends on the solar height. This can reach 60% in the worst circumstances, although most of the time, its value stays below 40%. The positive side lies in the good precision of the recordings. This systematic deviation makes it susceptible to mathematical correction. Therefore, the incorporation of more sensors and data that can help the global improvement of the precision and accuracy of this low-cost system is left as a future line of improvement. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor-Based Systems for Agriculture and Environmental Monitoring)

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27 pages, 5054 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Black-Box Mathematical Model for Net Photosynthesis Estimation and Its Digital IoT Implementation Based on Non-Invasive Techniques: Capsicum annuum L. Study Case

by Luz del Carmen García-Rodríguez, Juan Prado-Olivarez, Rosario Guzmán-Cruz, Martin Heil, Ramón Gerardo Guevara-González, Javier Diaz-Carmona, Héctor López-Tapia, Diego de Jesús Padierna-Arvizu and Alejandro Espinosa-Calderón

Sensors 2022, 22(14), 5275; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22145275 - 14 Jul 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1778

Abstract

Photosynthesis is a vital process for the planet. Its estimation involves the measurement of different variables and its processing through a mathematical model. This article presents a black-box mathematical model to estimate the net photosynthesis and its digital implementation. The model uses variables such as: leaf temperature, relative leaf humidity, and incident radiation. The model was elaborated with obtained data from Capsicum annuum L. plants and calibrated using genetic algorithms. The model was validated with Capsicum annuum L. and Capsicum chinense Jacq. plants, achieving average errors of 3% in Capsicum annuum L. and 18.4% in Capsicum chinense Jacq. The error in Capsicum chinense Jacq. was due to the different experimental conditions. According to evaluation, all correlation coefficients (Rho) are greater than 0.98, resulting from the comparison with the LI-COR Li-6800 equipment. The digital implementation consists of an FPGA for data acquisition and processing, as well as a Raspberry Pi for IoT and in situ interfaces; thus, generating a useful net photosynthesis device with non-invasive sensors. This proposal presents an innovative, portable, and low-scale way to estimate the photosynthetic process in vivo, in situ, and in vitro, using non-invasive techniques. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor-Based Systems for Agriculture and Environmental Monitoring)

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Review

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27 pages, 654 KiB

Open AccessReview

Analysis of Information Availability for Seismic and Volcanic Monitoring Systems: A Review

by Santiago Arrais, Luis Urquiza-Aguiar and Carolina Tripp-Barba

Sensors 2022, 22(14), 5186; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22145186 - 11 Jul 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2076

Abstract

Organizations responsible for seismic and volcanic monitoring worldwide mainly gather information from instrumental networks composed of specialized sensors, data-loggers, and transmission equipment. This information must be available in seismological data centers to improve early warning diffusion. Furthermore, this information is necessary for research purposes to improve the understanding of the phenomena. However, the acquisition data systems could have some information gaps due to unstable connections with instrumental networks and repeater nodes or exceeded waiting times in data acquisition processes. In this work, we performed a systematic review around information availability issues and solutions in data acquisition systems, instrumental networks, and their interplay with transmission media for seismic and volcanic monitoring. Based on the SLR methodology proposed by Kitchenham, B., a search string strategy was considered where 1938 articles were found until December 2021. Subsequently, through selection processes, 282 articles were obtained and 51 relevant articles were extracted using filters based on the content of articles mainly referring to seismic–volcanic data acquisition, data formats, monitoring networks, and early warnings. As a result, we identified two independent partial solutions that could complement each other. One focused on extracting information in the acquisition systems corresponding to continuous data generated by the monitoring points through the development of mechanisms for identifying sequential files. The other solution focused on the detection and assessment of the alternative transmission media capabilities available in the seismic–volcanic monitoring network. Moreover, we point out the advantage of a unified solution by identifying data files/plots corresponding to information gaps. These could be recovered through alternate/backup transmission channels to the monitoring points to improve the availability of the information that contributes to real-time access to information from seismic–volcanic monitoring networks, which speeds up data recovery processes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensor-Based Systems for Agriculture and Environmental Monitoring)

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