Water Management in Agriculture: A Survey on Current Challenges and Technological Solutions

Abstract

Water plays a crucial role in the agricultural field for food production and raising livestock. Given the current trends in world population growth, the urgent food demand that must be answered by agriculture highly depends on our ability to efficiently exploit the available water resources. Among critical issues, there is water management. Recently, innovative technologies have improved water management and monitoring in agriculture. Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Networks and Cloud Computing, have been used in diverse contexts in agriculture. By focusing on the water management challenge in general, existing approaches are aiming at optimizing water usage, and improving the quality and quantity of agricultural crops, while minimizing the need for direct human intervention. This is achieved by smoothing the water monitoring process, by applying the right automation level, and allowing farmers getting connected anywhere and anytime to their farms. There are plenty of challenges in agriculture involving water: water pollution monitoring, water reuse, monitoring water pipeline distribution network for irrigation, drinking water for livestock, etc. Several studies have been devoted to these questions in the recent decade. Therefore, this paper presents a survey on recent works dealing with water management and monitoring in agriculture, supported by advanced technologies. It also discusses some open challenges based on which relevant research directions can be drawn in the future, regarding the use of modern smart concepts and tools for water management and monitoring in the agriculture domain. INDEX TERMS Data analytics, internet of things, smart agriculture, water management, water monitoring, wireless sensor networks. II. FOUR CHALLENGES RELATED TO WATER MANAGEMENT IN AGRICULTURE We discuss four important challenges in water use in the agriculture domain (see Fig. 1). Each challenge motivates a significant shift from traditional water management solutions to smarter ones for higher efficiency, via the integration of modern technologies, e.g., WSN and IoT.

[Retracted] Development Level Evaluation of Water Ecological Civilization in Yangtze River Economic Belt

“…Due to the various factors involved in water ecology, many different evaluation systems have been established from diverse angles, namely, fish index of biotic integrity [1], biotic integrity index [2], rapid bioassessment protocols (RBPs) [3], and index of stream condition (ISC) [4]. In addition, some scholars carried out systematic research in river health theory [5], river health evaluation [6], water resources' carrying capacity, and integrated basin management [7].…”

Data Management and Integration of Low Power Consumption Embedded Devices IoT for Transforming Smart Agriculture into Actionable Knowledge

“…IoT-based solutions are investigated in order to help drive decisions in many agricultural areas, mainly water management and agriculture monitoring. These solutions can collect data from the farm's environment using networking protocols and standards, such as RFID, 4G/5G, LoWPAN, IEEE 802.15.x, and the future 6G [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

Principles of Irrigation Management for Vegetables

“…used in automated irrigation management and scheduling agricultural activities. Furthermore, these algorithms are developed to observe water content and ensure irrigation with automated activation when necessary [33]. Smart irrigation automation systems can be less used in open field agriculture, while they are used increasingly in greenhouse production with soil or without soil to save considerable amounts of water and nutrients that are heavily applied.…”