Opportunities in using visual IOT in the mitigation for peatland area

Abstract

Peatland cover over 400 million hectares of the Earth surface. It stores massive amount of carbon pool. They play major roles in accommodating the Earth global warming. But the logging activities from development agriculture site, and housing, has disturbed the ecosystem of peatlands habitat. Thus, urgent action from worldwide is required to protect and restore the peatlands. This includes raising the peat surface water level to avoid drying to mitigate fire. Canal blocking was done as one of the strategies to raise it. However, too high-water level might contribute to another problem, flooding. Hence, continuous monitoring is required to ensure the water level is maintained within the optimum level. This project explains the proposed system for water level detection on peatland areas using visual Internet of things (IoT). In addressing the power consumption issue a mechanism to enable power to be used only when necessary was introduced. This mechanism will only awake the camera when a certain threshold is reached and triggered the camera to capture the image. The proposed system includes the use of Raspberry Pi and camera as device to capture image with integration of Arduino to acquire sensors reading. The image is then processed and finally transmitted over cloud network. The outcome of this project produced camera-based water level detection prototype. The scope for this project is to highlights on Brunei peatland areas located at Badas, Brunei.