Water Sustainability through Drainage Reuse in Agriculture – A Case for Collaborative Wireless Sensor Networks

With increasing prevalence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and internet of things (IoT) in agriculture and hydrology, there exists an opportunity for providing a technologically viable solution for the conservation of already scarce freshwater resources. In this chapter, a novel framework is proposed for enabling a proactive management of agricultural drainage and nutrient losses at farm scale where complex models are replaced by in situ sensing, communication, and low complexity predictive models suited to an autonomous operation. This is achieved through the development of the proposed Water Quality Management using Collaborative Monitoring (WQMCM) framework that combines local farm-scale WSNs through an information sharing mechanism. In this chapter, we present the design of a framework for facilitating real-time utilization or disposal of agricultural drainage among farms using collaboration among prevalent farm networks. The basic system architecture comprises modules for environmental learning, prediction of the impact of neighboring events in terms of drainage and nutrients losses, and a local decision support mechanism. The overall functionality of the framework is explored in terms of stages of learning, training, and testing. A network learning model is required to identify flow links of a network with neighboring networks