Collecting Environmental data

The course will combine lectures-seminars, tutorials, interviews and on-site visits and project-based learning.

The goal for the students is to be able to perform an effective environmental data collection in order to carry out an agri-environmental project. To achieve this goal, the following program will be done:

• First week: Sensors and Arduino, Data Format: this week is about how to concretely manage sensors with basic knowledge of sensors and their characteristics for agro-environmental applications. Development of measuring system based on Arduino open-source platform within the framework of agro-environmental project is done. An introduction about data for agronomy and agriculture is also given.
• Second Week: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Arduino, Computer networks, Metadata: this week will give theoretical knowledge about how computer networks work and how wireless sensor network are managed with Arduino. An introduction about what are metadata and why they are useful for environmental data projects is given.
• Third Week: Statistics and Sampling, In-field data acquisition: this week will give the basics on how to perform a good sampling for data acquisition; it will then be concretely achieved in the field on a concrete application.
• Fourth Week: Data processing, Geomatics and Geographic Information System (GIS) basics, Global navigation satellite system (GNSS). This week will be about the first steps of data processing once the data have been gathered. As many data are of spatial nature, geomatics, GIS and GNSS notions will be investigated.

No books have been ordered for this course. All required readings are available as downloads from the Montpellier SupAgro teaching platform. There is no formal reading packet for this course.

Research Units: UMR MISTEA (L'institut Agro | Montpellier SupAgro & INRAE) and UMR ITAP (L'institut Agro | Montpellier SupAgro & INRAE)