The first principle is scale. When you try to traverse a forested landscape, you know the drill. Contours, deep, fast, vee cut streams, a thicket of branches above and below; you’re not in Kansas anymore. Predictive maintenance of infrastructure (access roads or firebreaks), optimized logging and monitoring biodiversity can transform forest management from reactive to proactive. IoT gives you options, due to its key ability to deliver real-time data from scattered locations.
Fires
Some factors are obvious; temperature, wind, and smoke sensors in dry environments, but how about thermal imagining, LiDAR and satellite imagery combined with IoT ground sensors to measure growth rates? Taking the bird’s eye view allows you to pinpoint areas with high survival rates, and conversely, those with combustible intentions.
Soil Health
Analyzing soil health for better planting strategies, weather monitoring, detecting fungal growth, measuring sap flow, moisture levels, and overall tree vitality to predict diseases or stress … there are significant use cases across a slew of vectors. Combined with solar, wind and kinetic power sources, many of the low power data connectivity options, like NB-IoT and LoRa, positively thrive in the peaceful deep woods.
Conservation
The fact that mesh technologies and low power networks combine well with acoustic monitoring means you can follow the dispersion of species. This kind of applied use for communication technologies is on the cutting edge of wildlife management, but it is possible to track migration patterns and herd size right down to individual animal health. When you consider the principles behind rewilding, reforestation and conservation, there is a deep toolkit of strategies available here.
Tracking
A primary use for IoT in its initial rollout is tracking firebugs, charting illegal logging or poaching and SAR (Search and Rescue). IoT is a powerful tool in the forest ranger’s toolkit simply because of the amount of territory it draws data from. The fact that the territory is hard to traverse on foot is a given, but that does not stop drone deployment or calling in resources from other locations. Once you begin to join the dots together, it becomes a lot easier to see the wood from the trees.
