# The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment
## 2 The Target Deployment Environment  
We focus on one specific geographic region around Conwy in North Wales (see Figure 1), a typical rural area supporting important industries including agriculture, forestry, tourism, and fishing but facing huge challenges brought about by climate change and conflicting demands on land/water resources. The Conwy river rises in the Snowdonia National Park in the Migneint range which has high rainfall providing water resources and important carbon storage and biodiversity in peatland habitats. The Conwy flows through intensive agricultural land out to an estuary important for the shellfish industry, conservation, and tourism. The lower Conwy was recently in the national news due to intensive flooding of several larger towns. Such extreme events are consistent with climate change predictions. The major shellfisheries and tourist beaches close to the Conwy estuary are continually subject to contamination, to risk of closure, or to loss of blue flag status due to microbial pollution from rural wastewater treatment plants and agricultural runoff. These pollution events are becoming increasingly frequent and are also exacerbated by floods, storms in general, and periods of drought.  
One of the main challenges in the Conwy and many other catchments/landscapes is the potential conflict arising from the needs of different industries, e.g., agriculture, water, tourism, and urban development, and the need for decision support tools to future-proof against climate change. The  
Figure 1: A wide-area view of the geographical region of our deployment. The areas marked in dotted lines are those actively studied by the environmental science team using various types of traditional (non-IoT (Internet of Things)) measurement equipment. The primary site used for our IoT project is that marked as “Hiraethlyn Improved”.  
GDP associated with Wales and the UK indicate that something is missing in local and national economies to varying degrees, and balancing their requirements is a major challenge for both government and industry alike. In the past, \"silo management\" has often resulted in a development by one industry negatively impacting on a second (e.g., the intensification of agriculture reducing water quality), and there is a move towards a more holistic consideration of these challenges (cf. Natural Environment White Paper [12]). However, a major problem identified in delivering this vision is the fragmented and inaccessible nature of the resources (i.e., data, models, and tools) needed for a more integrated approach.  
This problem is illustrated by the following scenario:  
* _Representatives from the Conwy shellfish industry contacted Prof. [PERSON] to ask why their shellfish products had just been rejected by Europe based on their high microbiological pollutant load and risk to public health. The industry wanted to know where the pollution was coming from, what caused the pollution to occur in the last month, and what safeguards they could put in place for the future. The professor used the Environmental IoT to identify any recent anomalous events in the Conwy catchment, which she suspected was the source of the problem. She determined that the recent movement of livestock into lowland areas combined with high rainfall and spring tides had caused a significant transfer of nutrients and faecal bacteria into coastal waters. She advised that the use of a mobile APP would allow them to predict when these events might happen in the future and when their waters would be safe to harvest shellfish again._  
An Environmental IoT provides a major opportunity to fill this gap, bringing together data and assets from across different domains (soil, water, plant ecology, and animals) and organisations (e.g., 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.