# The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment
## 5 Deployment Experiences of an Environmental IoT  
In this section, we report on some of the main deployment and operations stage of the project. Our deployment site is situated in a field in a region called Hiraethlyn, which is found in Conwy, North Wales. Figure 12 shows the number of the nodes in the field, and Figure 3 shows the layout of the soil nodes according to the topology of the field (swale, midslope, and foot of slope). Figure 13 shows the deployment area in Hiraethlyn, which is in a strategic location running alongside a tributary of the Conwy river. The river runs through the Snowdonia National Park in the Migneint range and drifts through intensive agricultural land out to an estuary important for the shellfish industry. A collection of images from this deployment experience is shown in Figure 14. One of the objectives of the IoT experiment is to enable the stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding any possibility of flooding of the Conwy river. The fact that this field slants towards the river tributary is one of the key contributors towards achieving this objective. As shown in Figure 13, the soil nodes are scattered around the Hiraethlyn field and also around the river bank. These soil nodes help to detect the soil moisture content of this field. This value coupled with the met office weather data can help to inform the environmental scientists about any possibility of flooding of the river.  
Another objective is to determine whether there is a danger of pollution or contamination to the river water due to the run-off of pathogens from the soil to the river. Given that the sheep roaming in this field contribute to the accumulation of pathogens that wash down to the river, it was decided to fit few sheep with a collar reporting their every movement through the IoT infrastructure. Therefore, the deployment procedure entails setting up this IoT infrastructure, consisting of the soil nodes in the field, the tracker collars placed round the neck of sheep roaming in this area, as well as installing the relay and gateway nodes. The following section gives more insight into this deployment process.  
Figure 14: Images from our deployment site. Clockwise from top left: initial site reconnaissance with environmental scientists; the site as we initially found it; a protective dome over a soil sensing node; configuring the relay node; constructing hardware at the site; and the location of the Internet gateway node.  
Figure 12: Number of nodes in the field.  
Figure 13: Hierarchlyn field deployment site.  
We first note that our deployment timing coincided (by chance) with one of the most severe storm and flooding periods in UK history, during November-December 2015, creating extraordinarily challenging conditions for operating technology in the field. The most significant problems caused by this were lower than anticipated solar charging levels and terminal water damage to some nodes. Nevertheless, our deployment was broadly successful, resulting in large volumes of real-time data collection from both the soil nodes and the animal trackers.