Department of Geo-Information Processing, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands.
Department of Computer Science, College of Natural and Computational Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa P.O. Box 1176, Ethiopia.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Apr 24;22(9):3273. doi: 10.3390/s22093273.
Agriculture is the economy's backbone for most developing countries. Most of these countries suffer from insufficient agricultural production. The availability of real-time, reliable and farm-specific information may significantly contribute to more sufficient and sustained production. Typically, such information is usually fragmented and often does fit one-on-one with the farm or farm plot. Automated, precise and affordable data collection and dissemination tools are vital to bring such information to these levels. The tools must address details of spatial and temporal variability. The Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are useful technology in this respect. This paper investigates the usability of IoT and WSN for smallholder agriculture applications. An in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of relevant work over the past decade was conducted. We explore the type and purpose of agricultural parameters, study and describe available resources, needed skills and technological requirements that allow sustained deployment of IoT and WSN technology. Our findings reveal significant gaps in utilization of the technology in the context of smallholder farm practices caused by social, economic, infrastructural and technological barriers. We also identify a significant future opportunity to design and implement affordable and reliable data acquisition tools and frameworks, with a possible integration of citizen science.
农业是大多数发展中国家经济的支柱。这些国家大多面临农业生产不足的问题。实时、可靠且针对特定农场的信息可以极大地促进更充足和持续的生产。通常，这些信息是零散的，往往与农场或农田不匹配。自动化、精确且经济实惠的数据收集和传播工具对于将这些信息提供给这些层面至关重要。这些工具必须解决空间和时间变化的细节问题。物联网 (IoT) 和无线传感器网络 (WSN) 在这方面是有用的技术。本文研究了物联网和 WSN 在小农户农业应用中的可用性。对过去十年中相关工作进行了深入的定性和定量分析。我们探索了农业参数的类型和用途，研究并描述了可用资源、所需技能和技术要求，这些都是支持物联网和 WSN 技术持续部署的关键。我们的研究结果表明，由于社会、经济、基础设施和技术障碍，物联网技术在小农户农业实践中的利用存在重大差距。我们还发现了一个重要的未来机会，可以设计和实施经济实惠且可靠的数据采集工具和框架，并可能整合公民科学。
