Towards the Internet of Living Trees for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

IoTree is a low-cost, low-maintenance, long-lived wearable sensing solution for monitoring the health of trees, providing fully autonomous renewable-energy collection and parameter sensing, compression, and transmission from over a mile away. The IoTree system is battery-free and operates on an opportunistic, block-based intermittent-computing paradigm; when the system is able to harvest enough energy via renewable sources, the LoRa controller will produce samples from the nutrient sensor and transmit the data to a base station for further analysis. Initial laboratory trials for IoTree demonstrate 91.08% and 90.51% accuracy in detecting ammonia and potassium oxide levels, respectively. Furthermore, a 30-day farm trial showed that the IoTree system could capture measurements regularly in the Grapevine farm deployment. IoTree is designed with open-source software, 3D models, and affordable off-the-shelf components, ensuring availability as a tool to educational institutes and hobbyists alike.