Soil Sensors and their Wireless Underground Network for Precision Farming and Environmental Management

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The objectives of this program are to develop: (1) In-situ soil sensors for monitoring soil properties such as soil moisture and nitrates; (2) Underground wireless sensor network for autonomously gathering the spatio-temporally varying soil properties; (3) Information management and decision-making technology based on distributed monitoring for modeling and analysis of agricultural production systems.The intellectual merits are: (1) Development of a network based framework for researchers to better understand properties of soils and the environment over a large area; (2) Establishment of an underground sensor and communication network; (3) Development of tools for fertilization management in farming for minimizing their environmental impact while meeting crop demands.The broader impacts are: (1) The proposed program is a step toward precisely controlling fertilizer application that will help reduce their run-offs to the watersheds and minimizing the environmental impact; (2) The proposed underground sensor network will find its use in any application requiring remote underground distributed-sensing, safety against surface activities (human, fire, etc.), or covertness (e.g., border patrol); (3) The underground network infrastructure can be used by other research community such as(remote-sensing) to calibrate/validate their own equipment/algorithms; (4) Three Ph.D. students will be trained in an interdisciplinary area of agriculture sciences, soil sensing, underground wireless networking, and decision-making based on crop/hydrologic-flow/carbon-cycle models.The transformative components of the proposal are: (1) Introduction of information and cybersystem technologies to the field of agriculture for precise, frequent, and high-resolution measurement of soil properties, and measurement-driven control of agriculture inputs; (2) Development of a wireless sensor network infrastructure capable of underground communication, energy-efficient operation, localization, and resiliency to failures; (3) Development of accurate and field-deployable sensors for measuring soil properties such as moisture and nutrient.