A LoRaWAN IoT System for Smart Agriculture for Vine Water Status Determination

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper describes a comprehensive system for monitoring vineyards, where not only the soil but also the plant itself and the surrounding climatic conditions are monitored. A modular RAK Wireless system, powered by a lithium battery and a solar panel, was used as the basis for the monitoring system. Signal transmission was implemented using the LoraWAN network, which formed a local communication platform with an interface to the Ethernet.

I evaluate the paper very positively both in terms of its processing and content. However, I would like to ask the authors to answer the following questions and to make any minor modifications:

1. Table 1 - you use the inaccurate term "strikes", presumably meaning a thunderstorm where the sensor can count the number of lightning strikes and their distance. 

2. Figure 8 - how do you explain the difference in temperature between the BME680-01 sensor and all the others? According to the source data, all other sensors provide almost the same temperature value.

3. At what time interval are the data sent to the server using LoRaWAN technology? 

4. How long do you estimate that the device can operate connected only on battery without the possibility of recharging using a photovoltaic panel?

Based on the above comments, I request a MINOR REVISION from the authors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This research article presented an installation of three groups of sensors (Environmental, Plant, and Soil) in a vineyard, connected through 6 LoRaWAN protocols for data transmission. This paper is well organized and the descriptions have well flowed. To improve the quality of the article, the authors need to consider the following:

 LoRaWAN for IoT is nowadays widely used in the agriculture sector. The author needs to add some recent literature on this issue and the water status estimation works.

The work deals with an interesting topic, the instrumentation used and the layout of the sensors are appropriate. The authors fail to explain how this article may be useful to “accurate estimation of the water stress’ or ‘clear view for transferring data for a wide range of communication’. At the same time, any discussion on the benefits of using additional sensors is not addressed.

Even though the experimental methods are correct, the work fails to have a scientific relevance and it seems more like a technical report on the results rather than a research article. In other words, there is no progression between the research hypothesis, the results, and the conclusions. Most of the text is devoted to the presentation of the results. The discussions are also very weak.

Finally, there is no comparison between the measured values and those reported in the literature.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The author did well to improve the quality of their article.