Estimating Vegetation Water Content with Wireless Sensor Network Communication Signals

This paper proposes a distributed measuring system based on wireless sensor networks (WSN) employed to estimate plant water-content in agricultural fields. The WSN is present in a crop field in order to measure environmental variables, like soil moisture. Water-content is obtained by measuring the attenuation of the network communication signal. The need for distributed measurements to estimate agricultural crop parameters is pointed-out and a mathematical model of the radio-wave propagation through the vegetation is developed. This model is used to estimate plant water-content. Experimental results are also presented.