| Abstract: | The Ethiopian Government planned to plant 5 billion seedlings this year. Over four billion
were reportedly planted in the First Green Legacy Campaign organized in 2019 during the
Ethiopian rainy season, which runs from the beginning of June to end of August. However,
planting trees across Ethiopia is that it might have the opposite of a beneficial effect, and
could even threaten some of the country’s ecosystems. Information about stewardship
activities such as, watering, treating like air pollution removal, and plantation site
improvements are also seldom track consistently after trees are planted despite research
demonstrating that such activities may directly affect the health and growth of the trees.
Thus, there was a need to design a solution for monitoring environmental condition using
the state-of-the-art technologies. In this research a Design science research methodology
was used to design and developed an IoT based prototype for monitoring environmental
conditions, in order to manage and control urban trees plantation and growth. In the study
different devices and technologies were interconnected to creating an embedded system
and collect real time data in the field. The systems inter-connected were GSM/GPRS
module, Grove Sensors, DHT11 sensor, Arduino microcontroller and ThingSpeak
platform. The results of the study show that the automation process using IoT in
environmental condition monitoring for urban trees plantation and growth reduced human
interaction and improve the efficiency. Testing and evaluation results also confirm that,
study was more relevant in their sector, and they envisioned to use the prototype in different
ways. With the use such tools greater improvement can be realized in capturing field data.
In addition, the thesis provides contributions to knowledge base by identifying the
challenge faced in planting trees across Ethiopia, and design and developed an artifact, this
could serve as a template for the implementation of such artifact elsewhere. |
