The Design and Deployment of an End-to-end IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) systems have seen recent growth in popularity for city and home environments. We report on the design, deployment and use of IoT infrastructure for environmental monitoring and management. Working closely with hydrologists, soil scientists and animal behaviour scientists, we successfully deployed and utilised a system to deliver integrated information across these two fields in the first such example of real-time multi-dimensional environmental science. We describe the design of this system, its requirements and operational effectiveness for hydrological, soil and ethological scientists, and our experiences from building, maintaining and using the deployment at a remote site in difficult conditions. Based on this experience we discuss key future work for the IoT community when working in these kinds of environmental deployments.