Background

In Latvia, woodworking is one of the biggest industries and generates revenue growth opportunities every year. The forest monitoring is considered to be a great opportunity for IoT technology suppliers that can deliver an integrated solution. “As growing trees is for sure a long-term business, it is necessary to discover all the issues that might happen”, said Will Sensors, one of our best partners in Latvia, with years-long experience in exploring and providing an expanding portfolio of purpose-built LoRaWAN® solutions that help connect more than hundreds of devices.

Challenges

• Build up a reliable alarming system
• Get accurate measurements from all aspects
• Collect rich data widely from all kinds of sensors
• Enable fast and timely wireless data transmission

Project

There are 60% of the forest are covered with trees and in our customers’ possession. They are now planning to take use of LoRaWAN® and sensing technology to get measurements from the forest. “This solution is about to help get data from field that represents water level measurements in rivers, ditches, groundwaters, temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction, UV radiation, rain-precipitation, water quality – dissolved oxygen, ph/ORP, conductivity etc., dendrometers and lot more”, said Ritvars, technical director of the Will Sensors.

Solution

In the past, people are usually use field and aerial surveys to collect data of forest. Now it is more common to use sensing technology to monitor the forest. In this case, Milesight has teamed up with our partner to propose an intelligent forest monitoring solution based on the UG87 LoRaWAN® Gateway and wireless sensors.

Featured Product:

UG87 LoRaWAN® Gateway

The UG87-Outdoor industrial LoRaWAN® gateway features an IP67 enclosure and provides peerless performance for essential IoT applications. It is expected to help accelerate the adoption of IoT technology by bringing low consumption and low cost LoRaWAN® networks for many industries.

Quick details:

• 3G/4G/ETH
• 8/16 Channel
• Rugged design with IP67 enclosure
• GPS, Wi-Fi, PoE
• Embedded NS, 3rd-party NS Partner: The Things Network (TTN), LORIOT.

Deployment

This LoRaWAN-based forest monitoring results can be generated and delivered at a frequency that suits the business operation and budget. It can be quarterly, monthly, weekly or even now daily.

The UG87 Outdoor LoRaWAN® Gateway usually is installed at higher place with kind of pole-mounted to provide around 11km LoRaWAN® network coverage and connect up to 2000 sensor nodes within a certain area for outdoor sensor connectivity. It can simultaneously receive LoRa and FSK messages on 8/16 channels with an excellent 4dBi high gain antenna, that is, 60mm glass fiber LoRa antenna. The gateway is powered by AC and well-performed in most harsh environments.

In the pic-4, there is a pipe in that wooden building to measure the groundwater levels in forest. It is 2m above ground and 8 meters beneath the surface. Our customers install hydrostatic probe and use TP-11 from other company to read 4-20mA signal, and transfer data to the UG87 LoRaWAN® gateway. The values will be displayed on PC and generates report and analytics then. With powerful and reliable cloud-based processing, our solutions can scale from one specific area to an entire plantation covering around 15km distance range.

Besides that, to build up a highly efficient monitoring system, our customers have installed different nodes in other places to detect the value of temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction, UV radiation, rain-precipitation and many more.

Benefits:

• Quick Identify Forest Changes through Data

This solution can help users to get a quick rundown of all of your data and empower people everywhere to better monitor the growth of forests.

• Get Forest Insights Widely and Regularly

By getting timely and precise information into the hands of customers, we know this solution will support decision making, and transparency through the capacity to regularly monitor large areas.

• Improved Working Efficiency

Managing the health and safety across the whole forest will be more effective.

About Will Sensors

SIA WILL SENSORS is a Latvian company. Since 2009, the company has been developing, consulting and assembling industrial sensors and equipment for automation of technological processes – operator-less control, monitoring, measurement and remote control. we are reliable partners for more than 1,200 customers, many of whom are equipment service, assembly and design companies. During the year, almost 15,000 sensors are integrated in various technological processes. It has implemented and continue to develop IIOT solutions with LoRaWAN®, NB-IOT, Bluetooth, LTE technologies in Latvian companies: for storage in warehouses, for monitoring underground processes in the field / forest, for monitoring in silos.