Success Stories

Success Stories

Forest Monitoring using LoRaWAN in Tropical Rainforests

Forest Monitoring using LoRaWAN in Tropical Rainforests

Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary is an animal sanctuary in Kerala covering an area of 344.44km2. The path to access to the Wildlife sanctuary lasts many hours and goes across roads and rivers. Presence of Wildlife animals and heavy rains common to tropical climate limit accessibility. The rain-forest is such a unique area that is vital for researchers' data collection in order to analyze environmental parameters.

Results / Outcomes 

  • Real-time information to researchers who are working in the nature reserve 
  • Long battery life so that no site visits are needed 
  • A technology solution that can be extended to future applications like animal tracking and an emergency communication mechanism for guards who travel deep into the forest
  • Implemented an  End to end  LoRaWAN setup including Gateway, Cloud application with intuitive dashboards.
  • Developed a low power sensor node with the capability to monitor several environmental parameters
  • A  cloud application based on Gadgeons IoT framework, Delpheon.

Aim of the Project

To  provide a solution that would help forest researchers to get environmental data over the geographically large forest area, and also the locations which are difficult or dangerous for them to access.
In Gadgeon we have implemented the LoRaWAN solution that could monitor temperature, humidity, and level of CO2 in real-time and transfer the data to the cloud for actionable insights. The primary reason we decided to use LoRaWAN is long-range and low power.

Challenge

In tropical regions, it is common to find landscapes that are covered with thick vegetation and forested areas. As a consequence, signals that propagate through them are greatly affected because, discrete scatterers in the forest such as the randomly distributed leaves, twigs, branches, and tree trunks can cause attenuation, scattering, diffraction, and absorption of the radiated propagating waves.

Installing multiple gateways for better signal penetration was the way out. As per our research, we found that real range in the tropical rain forests is around 5 km only.

System Architecture 

Lora-arcticture-design

System Implementation Details 

End Device
  • LoRa radio chip combined with a microcontroller and necessary sensors
  • RN2483 Radio module with a PIC18 microcontroller
Gateway
  • Raspberry Pi with InAir9B Radio module (sx1276 chip)
Cloud
  • DelCloud

Block Diagram

lora-block-daigram


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