Practical Study of the Temperature Effect in Soil Moisture Measurements

[EN] Precision agriculture is a current tendency whose goal is to increase the crop production while reducing the water and fertilization use. The use of low cost sensors and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are frequently used to implement complex systems to control the irrigation process in crops. Taking into account the importance of developing these low cost systems, in this paper we present a practical study that compares a commercial soil moisture sensor with the prototype of our inductive soil moisture sensor, which is based on two solenoid coils. Additionally, we measure its performance as a function of the soil temperature to quantify the effect of this parameter in the sensor measurements. The results show that the temperature greatly affects the sensors measurements and, although our sensor could be used to measure the soil moisture as a function of the temperature, the configuration of two solenoids is not the most suitable to perform this kind of measurements