Internet of Things in Forestry and Environmental Sciences

Internet of Things (IoT) is a revolutionary technology that aims to interconnect everyday objects equipped with identity, sensors, networking, and processing capabilities and allow them to communicate with one another and with other devices and services over the Internet to accomplish some objective. This is a transition from interconnected computers to interconnected things that require support for interoperability among heterogeneous devices enabling simplification of new application development for programmers under the infrastructure of IoT. Middleware for IoT is a software layer interposed between the infrastructure and the applications that basically aims to support important requirements for these applications (Yu et al. in Cybern. Inf. Technol. 14(5):51–62, 2014). Generally, the form of communication has been human–human or human–device, but the IoT is a communication as machine–machine. So, it is a network of objects with a self-configured wireless network. These IoT frameworks are used to collect, process, and analyze data streams in real time and facilitate provision of smart solutions. IoT is observed as a natural evolution of environmental sensing systems. This aims to use different sensors to measure key parameters in forest areas in regular basis, with no need of human intervention and to send this information via wireless communication to a central platform. IoT-based environment monitoring technologies and a smart home technology are being accepted by people because they have good prospects for development. IoT products in agriculture include a number of IoT devices and sensors as well as a powerful dashboard with analytical capabilities and in-built reporting features (Yu et al. in Cybern. Inf. Technol. 14(5):51–62, 2014). A networking-based intelligent platform can monitor forest environmental factors in time by applying IoT. This technology has the advantages of low power dissipation, low data rate, and high-capacity transportation.