Internet of Things for Sustainable Forestry

Forests and grasslands play an important role in water and air purification, prevention of the soil erosion, and in provision of habitat to wildlife. Internet of Things has a tremendous potential to play a vital role in the forest ecosystem management and stability. The conservation of species and habitats, timber production, prevention of forest soil degradation, forest fire prediction, mitigation, and control can be attained through forest management using Internet of Things. The use and adoption of IoT in forest ecosystem management is challenging due to many factors. Vast geographical areas and limited resources in terms of budget and equipment are some of the limiting factors. In digital forestry, IoT deployment offers effective operations, control, and forecasts for soil erosion, fires, and undesirable depositions. In this chapter, IoT sensing and communication applications are presented for digital forestry systems. Different IoT systems for digital forest monitoring applications are also discussed

Real-Time Tracking of Wildlife with IoT Solutions in Movement Ecology

Movement ecology has grown increasingly significant in the backdrop of global environmental changes, emphasizing the importance of understanding animal mobility patterns. The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology offers transformative potential for real-time wildlife tracking, addressing limitations of traditional methods like radio telemetry. Through IoT devices, researchers can acquire immediate, high-resolution datasets spanning vast distances, capturing multiple data points such as environmental conditions and physiological parameters. Existing implementations range from monitoring elephant movements in Africa to observing bird migrations. However, while promising, challenges like battery longevity, device weight, data management, and animal safety persist. As technological advances emerge, future prospects include more efficient, integrated solutions combining IoT with other technologies, poised to reshape and enrich our understanding of wildlife movement

Movement-Aware Relay Selection for Delay-Tolerant Information Dissemination in Wildlife Tracking and Monitoring Applications

As a promising use-case of the Internet of Things (IoT), wildlife tracking and monitoring applications greatly benefit the ecology-related research both commercially and scientifically. In literature, a Forward-Wait-Deliver strategy has been researched to facilitate energy-efficient dissemination of delaytolerant information, which penitentially contributes to long-term tracking and monitoring. However, this strategy is not directly applicable for wildlife tracking and monitoring applications, as the movement trajectory of animals cannot be precisely predicted for relay selection. To this end, further studies are required to utilise partially predictable mobility based on more generalised navigational information such as the movement direction. In this paper, the feasible exploitation of directional movement in pathunconstrained mobility is investigated for strategic forwarding. Our proposal is an advance to the state-of-the-art because the directional correlation of destination movement is considered to dynamically exploit the node mobility for the optimal selection of a stationary relay. Simulation results show that higher delivery utility can be achieved by the proposed fuzzy path model compared with a forwarding scheme without contact prediction or one based on linear trajectory model

Experimental Evaluation of a LoRa Wildlife Monitoring Network in a Forest Vegetation Area

Smart agriculture and wildlife monitoring are one of the recent trends of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which are evolving in providing sustainable solutions from producers. This article details the design, development and assessment of a wildlife monitoring application for IoT animal repelling devices that is able to cover large areas, thanks to the low power wide area networks (LPWAN), which bridge the gap between cellular technologies and short range wireless technologies. LoRa, the global de-facto LPWAN, continues to attract attention given its open specification and ready availability of off-the-shelf hardware, with claims of several kilometers of range in harsh challenging environments. At first, this article presents a survey of the LPWAN for smart agriculture applications. We proceed to evaluate the performance of LoRa transmission technology operating in the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, aimed at wildlife monitoring in a forest vegetation area. To characterize the communication link, we mainly use the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Findings from this study show that achievable performance can greatly vary between the 433 MHz and 868 MHz bands, and prompt caution is required when taking numbers at face value, as this can have implications for IoT applications. In addition, our results show that the link reaches up to 860 m in the highly dense forest vegetation environment, while in the not so dense forest vegetation environment, it reaches up to 2050 m

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Environmental governance and illegibility in the American West

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazards: the six-headed monster Scylla on one side, and the whirlpool Charybdis on the other. This conceit here guides a critical engagement with scientific knowledge and state power, grounded in the positionality and practices of government agents charged with the management of controversial species and processes in the American West. Based in ethnographic and archival research on wolf-livestock conflict and public lands grazing in Central Idaho, I relate how agents with the U.S. Forest Service and Idaho Department of Fish and Game navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Sailing the “choppy seas” of complex systems and multiple-use mandates, with the “whirlpool” of cuts to capacity on one side and the “monster” of political controversy and litigation on the other, agents appear to collect less or more ambiguous information on their charges, resulting in a partial “blindness” or illegibility. Although a rational adaptation to unrealistic expectations, this ignorance is not bliss but rather symptom and source of dysfunction, limiting agents’ ability to carry out monitoring, collaboration, and effectively conduct on-the-ground management. Understanding patterns of illegibility requires that we attend both to broader contextual pressures and situated motivations. In so doing, we might account for the seeming disconnect between agencies’ stated aims and practices, complicate traditional assumptions of evidence-based scientific management and analyses of bureaucratic rationality and state power, and make sense of the apparent dysfunction around environmental governance in the American West today