NI NERC-FAPESP: COSMIC-SWAMP, IoT Enabled Cosmic Ray Sensors for Irrigation Monitoring

全球约70%的淡水使用量用于灌溉，因此采用物联网精准灌溉等新型灌溉方法有可能提高农业部门的资源效率，并在全球范围内建立应对气候变化相关水冲击的能力。采用智能灌溉农业实践的一个困难是缺乏有效的方法来高精度地连续监测根区内的土壤水分。直到过去十年，测量通常依赖于传统的侵入式点尺度传感器或卫星数据进行连续监测。这两种方法面临的挑战是，它们不能为灌溉农业所需的测量规模提供最佳解决方案，即使在中等规模的场地上，也需要许多点探针来准确地解释土壤异质性，卫星数据分辨率太低，无法成为数据驱动的精确灌溉的可行选择。在过去的十年中，在环境和水文传感界已经被采用作为非侵入性测量土壤水分的替代方法。由于单个中子探测器可以在200米远的地方具有灵敏的足迹，因此该技术可以提供更适合于监测典型农田的长度尺度上的体积含水量估计，并填补了点探测器和卫星数据之间的差距。CRNS技术面临的一个主要挑战是，迄今为止使用的氦-3探测器系统可能很昂贵，限制了其在成本有限的应用中的有用性。为了避免这种情况，几个研究小组已经开始开发氦-3系统的低成本替代品，该领域正在达到一个临界点，该技术可能成为精准农业的可行解决方案。该提案旨在汇集农业土壤水分传感器开发和利用方面的领导者，以了解如何调整这种强大的水文监测技术，以最好地适应灌溉监测。通过修改两个新开发的低成本宇宙射线中子传感器，使它们可以直接与物联网智能水管理平台（SWAMP）接口，将有可能在几乎真实的时间内将宇宙射线中子数据与各种其他数据流相关联，以标准化的方式支持农业中数据驱动的精确灌溉建模。在巴西的一个枢纽灌溉点测试这些系统，通过国际网络提供给研究人员，将在全规模SWAMP网络上首次展示这种接口，并将使研究网络处于有利地位，以便将传感器应用于未来的其他精确灌溉挑战。

Approximately 70% of fresh water usage worldwide is for irrigation purposes, therefore the adoption of novel irrigation approaches such as IoT enabled precision irrigation has the potential to improve resource efficiency within the agricultural sector, and build resilience to climate change related water shocks at a global level. One difficulty in adopting smart irrigation farming practices comes from a lack of efficient methods to continuously monitor soil moisture within the root zone at high precision. Up until the last decade, measurements have typically relied on traditional invasive point scale sensors, or satellite data for continuous monitoring. The challenge with both of these methods is that they do not provide an optimal solution for the measurement scales required for irrigation farming, with many point probes required to accurately account for soil heterogeneity over even a modest size site, and satellite data being too coarse resolution to be a viable option for data-driven precision irrigation.Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensing (CRNS) has been adopted in the environmental and hydrological sensing community in the past ten years as an alternative way to non-invasively measure soil moisture. Since a single neutron detector can have a sensitive footprint up to 200 m away, the technique can provide a volumetric water content estimate at a length scale that is better suited for monitoring of typical agricultural fields, and fills the gap between point probes and satellite data. One major challenge faced by the CRNS technique is that the Helium-3 detector systems used to date can be expensive, limiting its usefulness in cost limited applications. To avoid this, several groups have begun developing low cost alternatives to Helium-3 based systems, and the field is reaching a critical point in which the technique could become a viable solution for precision agriculture. This proposal aims to bring together leaders in the development and utilisation of soil moisture sensors for agriculture to understand how this powerful hydrological monitoring technique could be adapted to best suit irrigation monitoring. By modifying two newly developed low cost cosmic ray neutron sensors so that they can interface directly with an Internet-of-Things Smart Water Management Platform (SWAMP), it will be possible to correlate cosmic ray neutron data with a variety of other data streams in almost real time to support data driven precision irrigation modelling within agriculture in a standardised way. Testing these systems at a pivot irrigation site in Brazil, made available to the researchers through the international network, will provide the first demonstration of this interface on a full scale SWAMP network, and will place the research network in a strong position to apply the sensors to range of other precision irrigation challenges in the future.