Review of integrating IOT and GIS potential to improve agricultural activities

Agriculture is an activity which is directly related to food security. Increasing of population and limited resources enhance the importance of this field. Therefore, there is a need to apply smart methods to achieve sustainable development and precision agriculture. In these methods, a lot of sensors are required to collect data because there are number of geographical, social, environmental and economic factors which affect agricultural activities. So we should deal with a lot of data which most of them have spatial aspects. In the other hand, GIS is a best solution to manage and analysis spatial data. This indicates potential of integrating of GIS and IOT to improve agricultural activities. In previous studies, efficiency of GIS in agricultural activities have been proved. Moreover, in recent studies, applications of IOT in agriculture have been grown significantly. However, few studies have investigated integration of GIS and IOT for this purpose. GIS provides wide variety of tools to manage data. Obtained data from sensors can be classified or data mining methods such as clustering can be applied to discover knowledge. Spatial correlation between different parameters can be calculated based on spatial statistics toolboxes and pie charts and bar charts allow comparison between different parameters in different spatial units such as agricultural parcels, regions, villages and counties.In logistics, GIS can utilize network analysis to offer fastet and or best routes to reduce time and cost of delivering products from producers to users. Moreover, integration of GIS and MCDM is useful for nursery management which are related to different criteria such as temperature, lighting and humidity. In the field of livestock, it is possible to pinpoint location of cattles on map in the moment and calculate their population density. In the field of irrigation, GIS can help us to investigate quality of groundwaters by applying spatial statistics methods.