Precision Agriculture Techniques and Practices: From Considerations to Applications

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT)-based automation of agricultural events can change the agriculture sector from being static and manual to dynamic and smart, leading to enhanced production with reduced human efforts. Precision Agriculture (PA) along with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the main drivers of automation in the agriculture domain. PA uses specific sensors and software to ensure that the crops receive exactly what they need to optimize productivity and sustainability. PA includes retrieving real data about the conditions of soil, crops and weather from the sensors deployed in the fields. High-resolution images of crops are obtained from satellite or air-borne platforms (manned or unmanned), which are further processed to extract information used to provide future decisions. In this paper, a review of near and remote sensor networks in the agriculture domain is presented along with several considerations and challenges. This survey includes wireless communication technologies, sensors, and wireless nodes used to assess the environmental behaviour, the platforms used to obtain spectral images of crops, the common vegetation indices used to analyse spectral images and applications of WSN in agriculture. As a proof of concept, we present a case study showing how WSN-based PA system can be implemented. We propose an IoT-based smart solution for crop health monitoring, which is comprised of two modules. The first module is a wireless sensor network-based system to monitor real-time crop health status. The second module uses a low altitude remote sensing platform to obtain multi-spectral imagery, which is further processed to classify healthy and unhealthy crops. We also highlight the results obtained using a case study and list the challenges and future directions based on our work.

Potential for the Detection of Irrigation Events on Maize Plots Using Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Products

“…On one hand, high-end local measurement point remains expensive but is not able to assess the heterogeneity of soil moisture in a field. On the other hand, a network of sensors (see for example [8]) requires time for installation and maintenance and data management and the system may fail (faulty sensor, incorrect calibration, saving or transfer of data and energy problem with nodes) [9,10].…”

An Autonomous Wireless Device for Real-Time Monitoring of Water Needs

“…In a smart irrigation system [19], the end-device achieved a distance of 7 km in the field tests. Table 1 shows a comparison of the different communication technologies discussed above for the creation of WSNs [8,16,21,22]. If we analyze the data shown in the table above, we can see that GPRS technology, apart from its high cost, is not entirely suitable for the communication of wireless sensors due to its high energy consumption, which means it is little used in the creation of high autonomy nodes.…”

Recommender System for Nutrient Management Based on Precision Agriculture

“…It has the complete details of sensor related data collection and shows the future scope of precision agriculture domain. Precision cultivation [12] is the forthcoming domain and it has current agricultural techniques. It describes the concept of wireless sensor networks.IOT based smart result of crop fitness and mechanism to denote unfit crops.…”

“…In set A, The number of sub branch per tomato plant is varied, maximum of sub branch is about 9 and minimum is about 3.The average of sub branches per plant is 5.6. In set B, The number of sub branch per tomato plant is varied, [12] maximum of sub branch is about 10 and minimum is about 2.The average of sub branches per plant is 6.…”