Smart Sensors for Sustainable Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

According to international organizations such as FAO, ensuring food security for the constantly growing global population of over nine billion by 2040, while dealing with the impact of climate change, is exerting serious pressure on farmers to keep up with food demand. This is a major challenge that requires producing more food with less natural resources, that is “more crop per drop”. In this context, sustainable agriculture is becoming increasingly important as a field of study focused on producing food and other agricultural products while minimizing negative impacts on the environment, promoting social and economic well-being, and ensuring the long-term viability of agricultural production systems. With automated agricultural process optimisation, and the recent innovation within the landscape of robotics and autonomous machines, all empowered by smart sensing, provides an immense promise to make sustainability possible. It is possible if sensors understand “speaking plants and animals” and implies using practices that conserve natural resources and biodiversity, support local communities, and preventively protect the health of plants and welfare of animals.

Smart Sensor technologies are seen as a promising solution for supporting and promoting sustainable agriculture, by decreasing the ecological consequences of farming, boosting profitability for farmers, and raising consumer approval of agricultural technologies and quality of goods. Advanced smart sensors along with methodological and technical solutions enable the gathering of measurements, storage and integration of data, and extraction of value-added insights, that are utilized by control and decision support systems to automate and optimize agricultural processes. Metaverse is one of the key enablers for the future society, which is envisioned to bring a new revolution to the digital world of Agricultural IOT (AIOT). For Metaverse, the physical world sensing will be integrated with the cyber world through digitizing physical objects to create smart sensing digital twins. Hyperautomation is the number one strategic technology trend, and twins are in the centre. AI can help developing twins and sensor fusion so that Model Predictive Control can vastly improve the sustainability but of course we must start from a good physical model. The new direction to unite technology into one end-to-end automation platform, requires very good information for all system variables and that is enhanced by the present expansion of smart sensing. This technological revolution poses significant challenges resulting in substantial changes in agricultural practices and offering valuable opportunities.

The objective of this Special Issue is to showcase cutting-edge papers focused on various aspects of smart sensors’ technologies in sustainable agriculture. These papers may include reviews, research papers, communications, technical papers, research concepts, and perspectives that highlight the applications and advantages of smart sensors for sustainable agriculture. Given the inherently dynamic and unstructured environment and the unforgiving conditions of agriculture with the aggravating force of climate change, we must apply knowledge-based sensor historical data analytics for ensuring data integrity and multivariable information enabling sustainable production of food. This smart sensing environment is what will empower the FAO mandate of SCPI (Sustainable Crop Production Intensification). The understanding of smart agriculture is important to be identified by the scientific community as a significant issue because it is needed for nations to develop and adopt these emerging technologies for the food chain.

Dr. Nick Sigrimis
Dr. Konstantinos G. Arvanitis
Prof. Dr. Minzan Li
Guest Editors

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