MONITORING ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS FOR URBAN TREES PLANTATION AND GROWTH USING INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT): THE CASE OF GREEN LEGACY PROGRAM

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.