Peatlands Monitoring in Malaysia with IoT Systems: Preliminary Experimental Results

Peatland forest fires are a serious threat to the biodiversity-ecosystem and to human health in South East Asia, especially in the dry season. Here, approximately 2.13 million hectares of peat swamp forests are found and made up of 6.5% of the total land area. However, monitoring and management of sustainable peat swamp forests can be improved, as degradation of the forest may happen. One of the main challenges in the forest management process is the lack of manpower to obtain in-situ samples for analysis and monitoring purposes. This paper proposes an Internet of Things (IoT)-based peatland forest management and monitoring system in Raja Musa Forest Reserve (RMFR), Selangor, Malaysia. Real-time peatland data such as ground water level (GWL), soil temperature, and soil humidity as well as local meteorological data such as rain precipitation, wind speed, ambient temperature, and ambient humidity are obtained from deployed IoT system on sites. The peatland data from January to March 2020 are recorded and analyzed.