Abstract:
—Pollinators play a vital role in ecosystem conservation, and their extinction would pose a serious threat to our
existence. Recent research has revealed that excessive use
of pesticides, fertilizers, and changing farming practices has
adversely affected pollinator biodiversity. Therefore, continuous farmland monitoring is required to check flying insects
for biodiversity conservation. The idea is to develop a digital sensor network across farmlands for the monitoring of
biodiversity at a large scale. In this article, a biodiversity
sensor (BS) is developed that can track the movement of flying insects in real-time, along with environmental conditions
and updates to the cloud server. The developed sensor is
a processor-based Internet of Things (IoT) device, powered
by a solar photovoltaic (PV)/battery bank and loaded with a
customized Linux operating system (OS) (using Yocto-build).
An over-the-air (OTA) update feature has been added to the
customized OS, allowing remote management and sensor
updates that were previously unavailable in the pre-installed
multimedia OS. The sensor can also be managed locally using the device manager portal (DMP), which exposes sensor
configuration and data download features over a local Wi-Fi hotspot. The developed sensor has been tested in the field,
and the result shows that the BS effectively captures the frames of flying insects and performs surveillance appropriately
with an accuracy of more than 90%. A comparison of power efficiency and central processing unit (CPU) utilization is also
made between the pre-installed multimedia OS from the manufacturer and the customized OS built using Yocto-build.
Results demonstrate that the developed BS is power efficient.
Index Terms— Biodiversity sensor (BS), embedded Linux, operating system (OS), over-the-air (OTA), processor,
