AGRICULTURE & FOREST METEOROLOGY

In agriculture and silviculture, as a branch of forestry, the need for increasing the production and simultaneously the efforts for minimizing the environmental impact and for saving costs make the sensor systems the best-allied tool. The use of sensors helps to exploit all available resources appropriately and to apply hazardous products moderately. When nutrients in the soil, humidity, solar radiation, density of weeds, and all factors affecting the production are known, this gets better and the use of chemical products such as fertilizers, herbicides, and other pollution products can be reduced considerably. These activities fall inside the emerging area known as Precision Agriculture. In forest management, which can be considered a branch of forestry, a lot of the number of activities is oriented toward wood production or forest inventories with the aim of controlling parameters of interest such as the diameter of trees, height, crown height, bark thickness, and other variables, such as canopy, humidity, illumination, CO2 transformation, where the social acceptation is of interest. Sensor networks allow collecting different types of in-situ information which can be conveniently exploited for controlling crop production or monitoring ecosystems by analyzing different variables, such as light, temperature, humidity, or climatological and anthropological events, among others. This information can be acquired by sensors deployed in different countries or areas and processed remotely, including web technologies.