Wireless Sensor Network deployment for monitoring soil moisture dynamics at the field scale

We describe the deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), composed of 135 soil moisture and 27 temperature sensors, in an apple tree orchard of about 5000 m2, located in the municipality of Cles, a small town in the Alpine region, northeastern Italy. The orchard is divided into three parcels each one subjected to a different irrigation schedule. The objective of the present work is to monitor soil moisture dynamics in the top soil to a detail, in both space and time, suitable to analyze the interplay between soil moisture dynamics and plant physiology. The deployment consists of 27 locations (verticals) connected by a multi hop WSN, each one equipped with 5 soil moisture sensors deployed at the depths of 10, 20, 30, 50 and 80 cm, and a temperature sensor at the depth of 20 cm. The proposed monitoring system is based on totally independent sensor nodes, which allow both real time and historic data management and are connected through an input/output interface to a WSN platform. Meteorological data are monitored by a weather station located at a distance of approximately 100 m from the experimental site. Great care has been posed to calibration of the capacitance sensors, both in the laboratory, with soil samples, and on site, after deployment, in order to minimize the noise caused by small oscillations in the input voltage and uncertainty in the calibration curves. In this work we report the results of a preliminary analysis on the data collected during the growing season 2009. We observed that the WSN greatly facilitates the collection of detailed measurements of soil moisture, thereby increasing the amount of information useful for exploring hydrological processes, but they should be used with care since the accuracy of collected data depends critically on the capability of the system to maintain constant the input voltage and on the reliability of calibration curves. Finally, we studied the spatial and temporal distribution of soil moisture in all the irrigated parcels, and explored how different irrigation schedules influence orchard’s production.