Soil Fertility Monitoring With Internet of Underground Things: A Survey

Underground soil sensing for fertility monitoring is an emerging paradigm to facilitate quantitative and qualitative improvement in the food production. Moreover, soil fertility monitoring is needed in order to protect the environment from greenhouse gas emissions. Underground soil sensing thus uses numerous types of sensors and devices that can help in the real-time monitoring of soil fertility. These sensory devices incorporate various communication protocols for relaying the sensory data. This provides motivation to present a review of existing underground sensing technologies with Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) that were used in agriculture for monitoring soil fertility. The presented taxonomy covers wide aspects of the state-of-the-art methodologies. Additionally, the challenges presented by IoUT in its design and implementation for monitoring soil fertility are considered and examined.