Wireless sensor networks for environmental research: A survey on limitations and challenges

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have permeated the entire fabric of academic disciplines that greatly rely on control and decision-making processes such as medical health care, agriculture, ecology and industrial automation. In ecology, an infrastructure consisting of networks of interconnected sensors can provide in-situ high-precision monitoring of natural phenomena at a large-scale. Moreover, WSNs provide a number of advantages to ecoinformatics such as the possibility of constructing quality datasets that coupled to machine learning-based prediction systems, can be used for ecological and process modelling. In this manuscript, we present a survey on recent WSNs based on several fields related to environmental research e.g. ecoinformatics, precision agriculture and wildlife observation. Finally, we have focused on the identification of limitations and open problems therein.