Sensing Methodologies in Agriculture for Soil Moisture and Nutrient Monitoring

Abstract

Development and deployment of sensing technologies is one of the main steps in achieving sustainability in crop production through precision agriculture. Key sensing methodologies developed for monitoring soil moisture and nutrients with recent advances in the sensing devices reported in literature using those techniques are overviewed in this article. The soil moisture determination has been divided into four main sections describing soil moisture measurement metrics and laboratory-based testing, followed by in-situ, remote and proximal sensing techniques. The application, advantages and limitations for each of the mentioned technologies are discussed. The nutrient monitoring methods are reviewed beginning with laboratory-based methods, ion-selective membrane based sensors, bio-sensors, spectroscopy-based methods, and capillary electrophoresis-based systems for inorganic ion detection. Attention has been given to the core principle of detection while reporting recent sensors developed using the mentioned concepts. The latest works reported on the different sensing methodologies point towards the trend of developing low-cost, easy to use, field-deployable or portable sensing systems aimed towards improving technology adoption in crop production leading to efficient site-specific soil and crop management which in turn will bring us closer to reaching sustainability in the practice of agriculture.

The Effects of Some Physical and Chemical Factors on Apparent Resistivity of Surface Soil in the University of Mosul, Mosul City, Northern Iraq

“…Soil characteristics are of a great importance in many applied fields, such as agriculture [1], construction [2], and earthing installation [3]. One of the important physical properties of soil is the electrical resistivity (ρ), which can be defined as the resistance in ohms between the opposite faces of a unit cube of the material.…”

Sensing Methodologies in Agriculture for Monitoring Biotic Stress in Plants Due to Pathogens and Pests

“…This article focuses primarily on the sensing methodologies developed in agriculture for monitoring diseases and stress caused due to biotic aggressors-pathogens and pests. A recent article by our group provided a comprehensive survey of soil moisture and nutrient sensing that cover the key abiotic sources of stress [19]. This section presents an overview of the responses of biotic stresses in plants that enables the development of technologies to detect them.…”

“…Methodologies enabling early and accurate detection of plant stress due to pathogens and pests provide a way for optimal deployment of countermeasures for reducing of losses in yield. Our group has been pursuing agriculture sensor design for soil [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and plant health [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], modeling for soil moisture/nutrients and plant growth dynamics [27,28], and decision-making for irrigation and fertilization for over a decade [27,29].…”

Inferring Agronomical Insights for Wheat Canopy Using Image-Based Curve Fit K -Means Segmentation Algorithm and Statistical Analysis

“…However, certain traits can be understood with the help of three phenomena: reflectance, absorption, and emittance, that occur naturally in all plants [ 6 ]. The current record on the advancements in agriculture instrumentation shows that all these phenomena can be captured with the help of imaging sensors [ 7 ]. It has been found that the best way to quantify water stress in plants is by measuring the reemittance of light from the plant surface.…”