Monitoring of a Productive Blue-Green Roof Using Low-Cost Sensors

Abstract

Considering the rising concern over climate change and the need for local food security, productive blue-green roofs (PBGR) can be an effective solution to mitigate many relevant environmental issues. However, their cost of operation is high because they are intensive, and an economical operation and maintenance approach will render them as more viable alternative. Low-cost sensors with the Internet of Things can provide reliable solutions to the real-time management and distributed monitoring of such roofs through monitoring the plant as well soil conditions. This research assesses the extent to which a low-cost image sensor can be deployed to perform continuous, automated monitoring of a urban rooftop farm as a PBGR and evaluates the thermal performance of the roof for additional crops. An RGB-depth image sensor was used in this study to monitor crop growth. Images collected from weekly scans were processed by segmentation to estimate the plant heights of three crops species. The devised technique performed well for leafy and tall stem plants like okra, and the correlation between the estimated and observed growth characteristics was acceptable. For smaller plants, bright light and shadow considerably influenced the image quality, decreasing the precision. Six other crop species were monitored using a wireless sensor network to investigate how different crop varieties respond in terms of thermal performance. Celery, snow peas, and potato were measured with maximum daily cooling records, while beet and zucchini showed sound cooling effects in terms of mean daily cooling.