Tech Briefs Magazine - May 2023 - 45

An Energy-Efficient Method to Monitor Soil Moisture
Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine's forests.
University of Maine, Orno, ME
M
onitoring and measuring
forest
ecosystems is a complex challenge
because of an existing combination of
software, collection systems, and computing
environments that require increasing
amounts of energy to power.
The University of Maine's Wireless Sensor
Networks (WiSe-Net) laboratory has
developed a novel method of using artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine
learning to make monitoring soil moisture
more energy and cost efficient -
one that could be used to make measuring
more efficient across the broad
forest ecosystems of Maine and beyond.
Soil moisture is an important variable
in forested and agricultural ecosystems
alike, particularly under the recent
drought conditions of past Maine summers.
Despite the robust soil moisture
monitoring networks and large, freely
available databases, the cost of commercial
soil moisture sensors and the power
that they use to run can be prohibitive
for researchers, foresters, farmers, and
others tracking the health of the land.
Along with researchers at the University
of New Hampshire and University of Vermont,
UMaine's WiSe-Net designed a wireless
sensor network that uses AI to learn
how to be more power efficient in monitoring
soil moisture and processing the data.
WiSe-Net could be used to make measuring more efficient across the broad forest ecosystems of
Maine and beyond. (Image: University of Maine)
" AI can learn from the environment,
predict the wireless link quality and incoming
solar energy to efficiently use
limited energy and make a robust lowcost
network run longer and more reliably, "
said Ali Abedi, Professor of Electrical
and Computer engineering at the
University of Maine.
The software learns over time how to
make the best use of available network
resources, which helps produce power-efficient
systems at a lower cost for largescale
monitoring compared to the existing
industry standards.
Although the system designed by the
researchers focuses on soil moisture, the
same methodology could be extended to
other types of sensors, like ambient temperature,
snow depth and more, as well
as scaling up the networks with more
sensor nodes.
For more information, contact Sam
Schipani, samantha.schipani@maine.edu;
207-581-3743.
Turning Plastic Waste into a Valuable Soil Additive
A new method creates useful char from plastic and corn waste.
University of California Riverside, CA
A
team of researchers at University of
California, Riverside, has moved a
step closer to finding a use for the hundreds
of millions of tons of plastic waste
produced every year that often winds up
clogging streams and rivers and polluting
our oceans.
In a recent study, Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz,
an Assistant Professor of Chemical
and Environmental Engineering,
and her colleagues detailed a method to
convert plastic waste into a highly porous
form of charcoal or char that has a whopping
surface area of about 400 square
meters per gram of mass.
Such charcoal captures carbon and
could potentially be added to soil to imTech
Briefs, May 2023
Waste Plastic
Corn Stover
Porous Char
Antagonistic
Effects
Volatile-Char Interactions
Activated Carbon
Co-Pyrolysis
Poor adsorptive properties
The char and activated carbon making process. (Image: David Danelski/UCR)
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45
Synergistic
Effects
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Tech Briefs Magazine - May 2023

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