Research and design of crop water status monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks

In order to precisely determine the extent of the water deficit and thus to provide a scientific reference for precision irrigation, a particular design of crop water status monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks (WSN-CWSM) is proposed. The designed WSN-CWSM system implements the automatic deployment of data gathering sensor nodes and self-organization wireless communication, which enables crop growers to precisely acquire the crop water requirement information at any time and any place, including the environmental factors related to crop water deficit, such as temperature, humidity, soil temperature and soil humidity, and the micro-changes in crop physiological indexes of water stress, such as acoustic emission signal, stem diameter microvariation. It possesses many improvements, such as low energy consumption, inexpensiveness, good robustness, flexible extensibility. Preliminary experimentations prove the rationality and practicability of this system. It can be effectively applied to greenhouse, cropland, and nursery garden, etc. This paper contributes to the exploration research on the applications of WSN in facility agriculture.