ISOC Research Team had received additional Lora-enabled devices designed to help rural communities and farmers residing near landslides improve well-beings.
Early on September, the Internet Society Kyrgyz Chapter had received request from the Ministry of Emergency Situations to install smart devices such as weather and landslide monitoring devices in the southern parts of the republic.
Desk research of the list of locations revealed that in some instances local communities live near the potential source of natural disaster. In the southern parts of the country, low-income families and communities are more vulnerable to consequences of natural disasters such as landslides, mudflows, earthquakes. Mostly because local residents primarily engaged in livestock farming and agriculture cannot afford better living conditions and economic opportunities in safer regions.
In the meantime, nowadays the scientific research project utilize the potential of Lorawan communication gateways for less than 1% of its capacity. Based on the available data, we decided to get more affordable low-cost Lora-enabled devices that could help farmers to grasp the potential of precision agriculture (smart farming) and improve their economic wellbeing.
In addition to the weather monitoring devices that should be installed in order to monitor pilot locations and help to build early-warning systems, we are planning to install sample devices to manage water irrigation of lands, monitor soil health and track animals gazing on landslides.
We plan to provide collected information in user friendly mobile interface and telegram bots so that local farmers could benefit most of technology as well as participate in monitoring of natural disasters.
The benefit of this initiative for the research project is securing the equipment integrity and data collection sustainability in the long term range.
