Honey Production with Remote Smart Monitoring System

The innovative technologies of precision agriculture can be applied to beekeeping, a very important sector both from an environmental and production point of view. Bees are responsible, through pollination, for the reproduction of numerous plants guaranteeing biodiversity and providing a final product, honey, highly energetic and with high health properties. Today, sensors applied to the hives can be used to obtain information on the colony phenology in the field, disturbing them as little as possible, allowing the construction of forecast models to control their health state and production increase. The Department of Agricultural, Food and Forest Sciences of the University of Palermo developed a WNS-type system for continuously monitoring and controlling the main environmental factors, both inside and outside the hive, in order to evaluate their influence on daily honey production. The novel system allows to identify any critical points in honey production recording environmental, sound and production data and real time transmitting them to the operators, accessing a specifically created web interface. The results of the study represent the basis for a precision hive management model that can be applied in different environmental conditions to optimize honey production

Geographic Citizen Science Design: No one left behind

Little did Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other ‘gentlemen scientists’ know, when they were making their scientific discoveries, that some centuries later they would inspire a new field of scientific practice and innovation, called citizen science. The current growth and availability of citizen science projects and relevant applications to support citizen involvement is massive; every citizen has an opportunity to become a scientist and contribute to a scientific discipline, without having any professional qualifications. With geographic interfaces being the common approach to support collection, analysis and dissemination of data contributed by participants, ‘geographic citizen science’ is being approached from different angles. Geographic Citizen Science Design takes an anthropological and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) stance to provide the theoretical and methodological foundations to support the design, development and evaluation of citizen science projects and their user-friendly applications. Through a careful selection of case studies in the urban and non-urban contexts of the Global North and South, the chapters provide insights into the design and interaction barriers, as well as on the lessons learned from the engagement of a diverse set of participants; for example, literate and non-literate people with a range of technical skills, and with different cultural backgrounds. Looking at the field through the lenses of specific case studies, the book captures the current state of the art in research and development of geographic citizen science and provides critical insight to inform technological innovation and future research in this area