# The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment
## 7 Conclusions  
This paper has examined the potential role of Internet of Things technology in supporting a deeper understanding of the natural environment, reporting in particular in the design and \"in the wild\" deployment of an exemplar Environmental IoT examining a range of environmental factors in a catchment in North Wales. The project has utilised field deployment of sensors and cloud computing to offer a shared repository of data to stakeholders. This data can be easily accessible and can be used to feed into models, to deal with uncertainty in models, and to discuss the results with other stakeholders and communities. We have also reported our experiences based on these challenges through our IoT system. The one barrier is the lack of maturity of Internet of Things technology based partly on the lack of standardization in this domain and also the many open research questions to be resolved, for example around minimization of energy and self-management. The slow uptake of the technology from the lab to the field is because most of these systems rely on nonstandard, custom-designed elements that need specialised expertise. The other challenges faced in setting up an Internet of Things in the natural environment are power limitations, poor Internet connectivity, and hostile operational conditions. Nonetheless, our aim through our Environment IoT system is to provide a major opportunity to fill the gap between different environmental science disciplines. The idea is to bring together data and assets from across different domains (soil, water, plant ecology, and animals) and organisations (public, regulatory, and industry) to enable integrated problem solving for the agriculture and water industries but with a clear potential to link to other critical industries in the future. We are particularly interested in new kinds of collaborations and associated management strategies that can stem from bringing real-time data sets together and observing related interdependencies. Prior to investing in expensive hardware, it is good to know if an IoT system can operate under the given conditions of an environment. We believe that the insight gained through our Environmental IoT project can serve as a basis for validating challenging environments when setting up an IoT system for such environments. Our overriding motivation was to develop a platform that was cheap and flexible and because we were limited in our equipment budget. Looking at other technologies, IoT solutions tend to to be either too specific in their application domains or came at a higher price point per node than we could afford. On the other hand, Accilma was a preferred sensor to Grove by the environmental scientists; however, they wanted to experiment with a cheaper alternative as the Accilma sensor is very expensive. They were willing to compromise on quality for quantity of real-time data points as long as there were a few of the high-quality inputs in the field as a known reference point. We have outlined some key areas of future research following on from this work most notably on areas such as systems of systems architectures, the role of edge devices in setting up a micro-cloud and bringing some computation with techniques such as machine learning on the micro-cloud, and self-organisation in complex distributed systems. In concluding the paper, we return to our central hypothesis: _\"A combination of IoT technology coupled with Cloud Computing enables a paradigm shift in our understanding and management of the natural environment, especially related to understanding ecosystem interdependencies, in times of unprecedented environmental change.\"_ This is clearly a rather bold and open-ended claim, but nevertheless our experiences indicate that this is an area of huge potential and that our experiments have shown that new styles of scientific enquiry can be supported by such emerging technology. We also flag this as an important area of future development of IoT technology.