Integrated geosptial sensor web for agricultural soil moisture monitoring

As an important variable in agriculture, especially in precision agriculture and drought, soil moisture has received increasing attentions. How to collaborate multi-platform sensors to obtain spatial-temporal continuously soil moisture monitoring is a main challenge. This paper overviewed an integrated geospatial sensor web for agricultural soil moisture monitoring in China. In this sensor web, satellite sensors (i.e., GF-1), in-situ sensors (i.e., BDS-R), and wireless sensor networks were firstly coupled by sensor web based cyber infrastructure. Then multi-sensor collaboration methods were designed to make full use of these different monitoring capabilities. In addition, web processing service was utilized to achieve online soil moisture estimating, fusing, and mapping. Finally, an integrated online service platform was constructed to query and display all soil moisture related resources. The experiments conducted in Hubei province demonstrated that this region´s agricultural soil moisture monitoring capability was improved in terms of spatial-temporal continuity and accuracy. Therefore, the integrated geospatial sensor web is a powerful infrastructure for agriculture monitoring.