Department of Engineering, University of Salento, Via Monteroni, 73100 Lecce, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Feb 25;22(5):1824. doi: 10.3390/s22051824.
Fighting Earth's degradation and safeguarding the environment are subjects of topical interest and sources of hot debate in today's society. According to the United Nations, there is a compelling need to take immediate actions worldwide and to implement large-scale monitoring policies aimed at counteracting the unprecedented levels of air, land, and water pollution. This requires going beyond the legacy technologies currently employed by government authorities and adopting more advanced systems that guarantee a continuous and pervasive monitoring of the environment in all its different aspects. In this paper, we take the research on integrated and large-scale environmental monitoring a step further by providing a comprehensive review that covers transversally all the main applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and crowdsensing monitoring technologies. By outlining the available solutions and current limitations, we identify in the cooperation among terrestrial (WSN/crowdsensing) and aerial (UAVs) sensing, coupled with the adoption of advanced signal processing techniques, the major pillars at the basis of future integrated (air, land, and water) and large-scale environmental monitoring systems. This review not only consolidates the progresses achieved in the field of environmental monitoring, but also sheds new lights on potential future research directions and synergies among different research areas.
应对地球退化和保护环境是当今社会备受关注的议题，也是激烈辩论的源头。联合国指出，全球必须立即采取行动，实施大规模监测政策，以应对空前的空气、土地和水污染水平。这需要超越政府当局目前使用的传统技术，采用更先进的系统，以保证对环境的所有不同方面进行持续和普遍的监测。在本文中，我们通过全面回顾无线传感器网络 (WSN)、无人机 (UAV) 和众包监测技术的所有主要应用，将综合和大规模环境监测的研究向前推进了一步。通过概述现有解决方案和当前的局限性，我们确定了地面（WSN/众包）和空中（UAV）传感之间的合作，以及采用先进的信号处理技术，是未来综合（空气、陆地和水）和大规模环境监测系统的基础。这篇综述不仅巩固了环境监测领域的进展，还为未来的研究方向以及不同研究领域之间的协同作用提供了新的思路。
