Coronavirus (COVID-19), environmental safety, and the dynamics of soil management

Abstract

The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the epidemic of the Ebola virus, and currently the COVID-19 pandemic is an essential wake-up call for all countries to transform the approach to soil assessment and environmental management, and these diseases have proved how quickly a new virus can spread to every corner of the globe. With so many countries declaring the state of the emergency protocol due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, adopting and intensifying the provisions for the fourth industrial revolution technologies such as robotics and state-of-the-art mobile laboratories could be the only way to transform and expedite the approach to soil assessment, mapping, monitoring, and environmental management. This article proposes the fourth industrial revolution methodologies that can be adapted to assist the farmers and community in managing soils and the environment when the world nations are in a predicament of the pandemic such as COVID-19. The task would be to develop an outdoor automated or semi-autonomous machine vision system (drone or a robot) that can exceptionally substitute human labour on soil management tasks that are critical and cannot be performed by human labour as a result of COVID-19 national lockdown and any other related limitations of infield conventional assessment methods.