# A Smart Sensing System of Water Quality and Intake Monitoring for Livestock and Wild Animals
## 1 Introduction
Additionally, portable water intake technology would provide new insights to wildlife habitat relationships, population dynamics, and response to variable environmental conditions. A primary reason for limited information on wildlife water intake is a lack of technology available to quantify water intake in remote areas that will not disrupt natural watering behaviors. To address the above-mentioned challenges, there is a significant need for an intelligent drinking system that refills the drinking tanks as well as records the quantity and quality of water consumed by each identifiable individual animal. Currently, there are very few solutions addressing water management for monitoring watering behaviors for animal agriculture. Commercial solutions, such as Insectc from Hokomfarm, are usually expensive and mainly utilized by larger framing corporations or research institutions, whereas smaller-sized ranching operations cannot afford to implement these systems for their drinking stations. Another issue is that commercially available solutions are usually confinement setups, which are not easy for remote grazing sites and not able to be used for monitoring wild animals. Based on the design constraints, biological sensing and data acquisition systems [22; 23; 24; 25] would take an important role in developing an integrated water monitoring system by combining low-cost sensors, embedded systems, and data communication or storage devices [26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32]. Such devices are expected to be deployed in the remote ranching sites to track the water intake and watering behavior of both livestock and wildlife. Recently, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies [33] have gained popularity in the application of the internet of things [34; 35] and especially in sensors and sensing systems [36; 37], such as 3D chipless RFID tags [38], fully-textile chipless tags [39], and frequency-signature based wearable tags [40]. The wireless sensor network has also been playing an important role in industrial and agricultural applications [41]. In this work, we propose a portable smart water intake monitoring system for measuring and analyzing the quantity and quality of the water of livestock and wildlife in remote locations. The domestic livestock includes cows and sheep, and the wildlife animals include wild horses and deer. The system is based on multisensor integration in a cost-effective and affordable manner using the complementary method, as shown in Figure 1. The sensors used in the system include RFID readers, motion detectors, water level meters, water flow meters, and temperature sensors. In this system, the RFID reader is applied to identify tags attached to cattle that use the system. The motion detector activates the RFID reader, the camera, as well as the water level meter and water flow meter once an animal, domestic or wild, moves in front of the drinking station. The camera records the front image of the animal. The system records the water amount that the specific animal consumes each time as well as the drinking duration. As wild animals do not have an RFID tag, water consumption by wild animals is recorded using the motion detector and the camera. The water level meter measures water consumption in the drinking station tank. When the level of water in the tank falls below a specific amount, the system opens a valve and refills the tank with water from an external water source, which is recorded by the water flow meter. All the data recorded by the system are stored on an SD card. The system is automated and functions without user input once set up in the field. The sensor network method [41] plays an important role in the proposed system. Compared with other similar systems mentioned in the previous paragraph, the proposed system utilizes sensor networks that combine vision sensors, motion detectors, RFID systems, flow meters, temperature sensors, and turbidity sensors.