Low-Cost Iot Environmental Monitoring Station to Assess GxE Interactions in Variety Trials.

One of the difficulties in assessing results from multi-environment variety field trials is understanding the Genotype by Environment interaction (GEI). While our ability to quantify agronomic performance and quality characteristics of wheat and other crops is well established our understanding of environment has so far been limited. To further the understanding of the effect of environment on trial results, we built environmental monitoring stations to measure variables at each trial location. Customization and reduced costs of the stations ($360 each) are enabled through opensource hardware and software. As research goals grow and evolve, the stations can be designed with a wide variety of purchased or built sensors. The stations implemented in our project use a combination of commercially available instruments (anemometer and rain gauge), “breakout boards” (air temperature/ humidity and soil moisture/ soil temperature) and built (pyranometer) instruments. Station manufacture takes advantage of 3D designed and printed parts for instrument housing and shielding. Due to gaps in cellular coverage, our data acquisition is a combination of local logging to an SD card and cellular modems to connect to Internet of Things (IoT) web-based services for real time data, trouble shooting and control. While the initial effort required to source, build, and program is greater than commercially available options, our low costs allow us to install more stations, increasing our statistical power. We can customize our program and instrumentation to fit our research goals. We intend to add resources to our Extension web site giving detailed instructions for researchers and growers to build their own environmental monitoring station(s).