Internet of trees: A vision for advanced monitoring of crops

Ecosystem preservation and production maximisation are competing objectives in agriculture. Reducing theneed of undifferentiated or late interventions on the crops would reduce the number of disease treatmentsneeded, as well as the consumption of water and fertiliser. This objective is only attainable through crop mon-itoring systems able to reach a single plant. Precision agriculture employ continuous and pervasive monitoringof crops, that in turn allows fast and targeted interventions. The aim of this paper is to highlight the problemsthat can be found in designing a wireless sensor network (WSN) able to measure environmental parameterssuch as relative humidity, irradiance and volatile pollutant concentration and introduces a possible solutionthat we named the Internet of Trees.