Abstract
Fighting Earth’s degradation and safeguarding the environment are subjects of topical interest and sources of hot debate in today’s society. According to the United Nations, there is a compelling need to take immediate actions worldwide and to implement large-scale monitoring policies aimed at counteracting the unprecedented levels of air, land, and water pollution. This requires going beyond the legacy technologies currently employed by government authorities and adopting more advanced systems that guarantee a continuous and pervasive monitoring of the environment in all its different aspects. In this paper, we take the research on integrated and large-scale environmental monitoring a step further by providing a comprehensive review that covers transversally all the main applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and crowdsensing monitoring technologies. By outlining the available solutions and current limitations, we identify in the cooperation among terrestrial (WSN/crowdsensing) and aerial (UAVs) sensing, coupled with the adoption of advanced signal processing techniques, the major pillars at the basis of future integrated (air, land, and water) and large-scale environmental monitoring systems. This review not only consolidates the progresses achieved in the field of environmental monitoring, but also sheds new lights on potential future research directions and synergies among different research areas.
Highlights
Preserving and protecting the environment is, today more than ever, an imperative requirement for modern society
Some review papers started to appear that consider collaborative monitoring systems based on a combination of two technologies—for instance, wireless sensor networks (WSNs)-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [52,53] and WSN-crowdsensing [54]—but with the main purposes of improving specific tasks such as the management of natural disasters or the monitoring of pollution in urban areas, without, taking into account all the remaining aspects involved in environmental monitoring
The review of the individual WSN, UAV, and crowdsensing technologies outlined that, despite remarkable improvements in some specific application contexts compared to the use of legacy systems, the monitoring capabilities for most approaches proposed in the literature are still limited by either the insufficient information gathered by sensor nodes or by some intrinsic limitations of the adopted technologies
Summary
Preserving and protecting the environment is, today more than ever, an imperative requirement for modern society. Some review papers started to appear that consider collaborative monitoring systems based on a combination of two technologies—for instance, WSN-UAV [52,53] and WSN-crowdsensing [54]—but with the main purposes of improving specific tasks such as the management of natural disasters or the monitoring of pollution in urban areas, without, taking into account all the remaining aspects involved in environmental monitoring In this respect, the general scope of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review that transversally considers the three sensing technologies (WSN, UAV, and crowdsensing) and combines their benefits in a synergistic manner, taking into account all the different application contexts at hand (air, land, and water) and jointly considering the main involved tasks, from data acquisition to communication and processing.
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