Webinar: Role of IoT and Edge Computing in addressing biodiversity and environmental monitoring

AIOTI organised a webinar on 23 May 2023 to present the paper Role of IoT and Edge Computing in addressing biodiversity and environmental monitoring, which can be found here.

The European Commission presented in 2019 the European Green Deal as the European response to the serious challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. Biodiversity and the environment are key areas under the umbrella of the Green Deal. In particular, biodiversity/environment observation and understanding has been identified as key supporting element to fight climate change and achieve a sustainable economy, prosperous for all European citizens. Spurred by the EU Green Deal policy, a number of relevant monitoring initiatives are currently being launched at different scales, with ambitious objectives, towards the preservation of landscapes and biodiversity. After reviewing in Section 2 the most relevant initiatives for biodiversity and environment monitoring, the current paper focuses on the use of Internet of Things technologies for fulfilling the monitoring needs. Section 3 analyses the concept of IoT-based monitoring and presents four illustrative use cases in different fields, as well as a short list of commercial solutions. Based on the preliminary findings, Section 4 finally summarises the main gaps identified and provides recommendations on the way to go. It is important to note that the current paper is ongoing work and will be refined in subsequent iterations in order to deepen the preliminary analysis and stock-taking.

Recommendations:

1. Elaborate a list of requirements for the monitoring of biodiversity features (what and why should be measured).
2. Elaborate a mapping between biodiversity features and physical variables/parameters to be measured.
3. Analyse the match between monitoring requirements and available technology/solutions, with a clear indication of the maturity level (TRL). In particular, a stock-taking of commercial solutions should be performed.
4. Analyse rigorously the business case for biodiversity monitoring in order to facilitate the feasibility analysis of different monitoring approaches.
5. Connect the biodiversity monitoring initiatives and projects with the EU Green Deal and Agriculture data spaces, taking into account from the beginning the data standardisation aspects

Webinar presentation can be found here and recording of the webinar here.