Responding to the growing demand of precision from the smart agriculture devices market, Libelium releases a new version of its Smart Agriculture sensor node improving maximum accuracy for crop monitoring. The enhanced Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture Xtreme device includes top tier third-party performance sensors for the most exigent field applications such as vineyards, fruit orchards and greenhouse cultivations, among others.
The solution features 19 sensors from prestigious and reliable manufacturers of agricultural technology such as Apogee, Decagon, Ecomatik and Gill Instruments. This integration enables the measuring of different parameters related to weather conditions, light and radiation levels, soil morphology, fertilizers presence, frost prevention, daily growth of plants and fruits and other environmental parameters to improve crop quality production and to prevent harvest losses.
According to a recent FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report, between 2005 and 2015, natural disasters cost $96 billion in damage to agricultural and livestock production. Weather disasters such as storms or extreme temperatures caused losses of $26.5 billion and biological disasters, such as pests and infestations, caused crop losses of $9.5 billion. In Asia, the region of the world where agriculture has been most affected by disasters, floods and storms have had the greatest impact.
The Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture Xtreme sensor node includes a more reliable weather station to measure the wind and precipitations via optical technology. It also features a complete set of light and radiation sensors such as ultraviolet radiation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and shortwave radiation. The soil morphology and the presence of fertilizers can be analyzed by measuring electrical conductivity, volumetric water content, soil water potentials and oxygen levels. To prevent frost, the new device allows customers to connect a special sensor to measure non-contact plants and fruits surface temperature. And for daily growth monitoring, there are a set of dendrometers to control the growing of the trunk, the stem and the fruit of the plant.
For more details, visit Libelium Smart Agriculture.