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Top1. Introduction
The curiosity of humankind for the natural environment was the driving force that led him to search and learn issues related to complex environmental phenomena. Thanks to that and through detailed monitoring, nowadays we have the knowledge to predict events or prevent them from happening. At the very beginning, every physical condition and parameter was measured by some analog devices, which, at that time, were very innovative, but too costly and not very accurate. Following on, the use of digital data loggers replaced these analog devices, and despite being less expensive and more easy to use, this data logging technology was still inefficient. Recent technological advances, namely continuing miniaturization of electronics, the availability of large data storage and computational capacity, and the pervasive connectivity of the Internet, led to the development of tiny sensor devices with sensing, processing, and communicational capabilities that were able to provide with accurate local measurements of the monitored parameters. These devices, which are called wireless sensor nodes, when deployed in an area, form a Wireless Sensor Network. WSNs constitute a powerful and promising tool for monitoring events (Akyildiz, Su, Sankarasubramaniam, & Cayirci, 2002). This new approach of gathering information from the environment could provide with the much-needed feedback between the monitored field, the local climate conditions, and the human’s decisions of treating the field.
The initial development of WSN was motivated by military applications such as enemy monitoring and tracking, force protection, battlefield surveillance, etc. Nowadays, WSNs are used in many other application fields such as agriculture, environmental monitoring (e.g., air-water pollution, greenhouse phenomena, monitoring of oceans, volcanoes, forests, etc.), health monitoring, home automation, and more. In this article, we consider the case of WSNs being deployed for environmental monitoring purposes. Such WSNs are also referred to as Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs) (Martinez, Hart, & Ong, 2004), (Corke, Wark, Jurdak, Hu, Valencia, & Moore, 2010). Depending on the application, ESNs can be employed to perform habitat monitoring (Polastre, 2003), flooding-landslide-earthquake detection (Tan, Xing, Chen, Song, & Huang, 2013) monitoring of volcanic eruptions (Song, Huang, Xu, Ma, Shirazi, & Lahusen, 2009), (Huang, Song, Xu, Peterson, Shirazi, & LaHusen, 2012), microclimate monitoring for farms and rain forests (Wark, et al., 2008), cattle monitoring and control (Kwong, et al., 2009), and much other.
While there is an endless list of scientific papers discussing WSN-based environmental monitoring applications, these works do not provide deployment guidelines or design considerations with regard to the deployed sensor network. Hence, someone willing to deploy a WSN for these applications is left alone to choose the technologies to be used. In order to fill the gap, this paper provides generic guidelines on how to deploy WSNs in five different real-life environmental monitoring applications. In achieving this objective, the paper discusses the different field deployments summarizing at the same time the software and hardware components used in each of them. Using this information, it then proposes five easy-to-use guides for deploying WSNs in these deployment fields. Finally and more importantly, it showcases the usefulness of consulting the resulted guides, by considering representative real-life application scenarios for each of the five different field deployments. It is expected that a number of stakeholders including researchers, scientists, environmentalists, agronomists, farmers, etc., will be benefited from consulting the produced guides.