PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 18: Ecological guidelines for management of water quantity and quality in agricultural landscapes
Organizer(s): L Ryszkowski and R Lowrance
Tuesday, August 9, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Monitoring systems for water management at landscape level.
Skierucha, Wojciech*,1, Walczak, Ryszard1, Malicki, Marek1, Wilczek, Antoni1, 1 Institute of Agrophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Lublin, Poland
ABSTRACT- The development of technology in the recent years increased the number of monitoring tools for the application in agrophysics. The most promising are one-structure smart sensors integrating different technologies and sensor networks communicating together and with the management units in global way and incorporating wireless communication as well as Internet. The study presents new instrumentation for monitoring porous media properties especially soil, recently developed in the Institute of Agrophysics Polish Academy of Sciences. The presented developments include both sensors and data acquisition systems: new upgraded versions of TDR soil moisture, salinity and temperature meters, ion-selective electrodes for application in the measurement of selected ion concentrations in the soil and modern data acquisition systems. The applied sensors can be accessible from any place in the world using wired Internet connection and also wireless GPRS modems or radio link in cases when the access to the monitored objects is limited. The measurement devices are also enhanced with Global Positioning System facilities for application in precision agriculture. The presented data logger for collecting physico-chemical parameters of soil environment represents modern trends in the development of measurement systems. It is characterized by low power consumption, high capacity of storage memory and availability of numerous interfaces for connection of various sensors and accessory equipment. Traditional sensors and measurement devices, such as soil thermometers, reflectometric soil moisture meters, soil tensiometers for water potential measurement, rain-gauges and others may be easily equipped with not expensive, intelligent communication interfaces enabling identification, addressing as well as hardware and software compatibility with the presented data logger. The system is designed in modular way for future modifications following the progress in the metrology of non-electrical quantities and the general technological development. The presented developments were tested in field conditions in harsh environment as multi-node system covering a large area and controlled from a remote PC compatible computer communicating with the addressed sensors both by Internet and radio link.
Key words: agricultural landscape, water cycling, monitoring, soil properties