A survey on wireless sensor network technologies in pest management applications

Abstract

Animal pests notoriously cause billions of dollars of damage by spoiling crops, damaging infrastructure and spreading disease. Pest control companies try to mitigate this damage by implementing pest management approaches to respond to and prevent infestations. However, these approaches are labour intensive, as pest control technicians must regularly visit the affected areas for monitoring and evaluation. Current remote sensing technologies can allow for decision making based on real-time data remotely uploaded from pest traps. This reduces the frequency of field visits and improves the pest management process. In this paper, we survey a variety of modern data-driven pest management approaches. We also evaluate wireless communication infrastructures which can be used to facilitate data transfer between pest traps and cloud servers.