This article presents a platform for environmental data named “Environmental Cloud for the Benefit of Agriculture” (CEBA). The CEBA should fill the gap of a regional institutional platform to share, search, store and visualize heterogeneous scientific data related to the environment and agricultural researches. One of the main features of this tool is its ease of use and the accessibility of all types of data. To answer the question of data description, a scientific consensus has been established around the qualification of data with at least the information “when” (time), “where” (geographical coordinates) and “what” (metadata). The development of an on-premise solution using the data lake concept to provide a cloud service for end-users with institutional authentication and for open data access has been completed. Compared to other platforms, CEBA fully supports the management of geographic coordinates at every stage of data management. A comprehensive JavaScript Objet Notation (JSON) architecture has been designed, among other things, to facilitate multi-stage data enrichment. Data from the wireless network are queried and accessed in near real-time, using a distributed JSON-based search engine.

While radon in soil gases has been identified for decades as a potential precursor of volcanic eruptions, there has been a recent interest for monitoring radon in air on active volcanoes. We present here the first network of outdoor air radon sensors that was installed successfully on Mt. Etna volcano, Sicily, Italy in September 2019. Small radon sensors designed for workers and home dosimetry were tropicalized in order to be operated continuously in harsh volcanic conditions with an autonomy of several months. Two stations have been installed on the south flank of the volcano at ~3000 m of elevation. A private network has been deployed in order to transfer the measurements from the stations directly to a server located in France, using a low-power wide-area transmission technology from Internet of Things (IoT) called LoRaWAN. Data finally feed a data lake, allowing flexibility in data management and sharing. A first analysis of the radon datasets confirms previous observations, while adding temporal information never accessed before. The observed performances confirm IoT solutions are very adapted to active volcano monitoring in terms of range, autonomy, and data loss.

Climate change is having an increasingly rapid impact on ecosystems and particularly on the issue of water resources. The Internet of Things and communication technologies have now reached a level of maturity that allows sensors to be deployed more easily on sites to monitor them. The communicating node based on LoRaWAN technology presented in this article is open and allows the interfacing of numerous sensors for designing long-term environmental monitoring systems of isolated sites. The data integration in the cloud is ensured by a workflow driving the storage and indexing of data, allowing a simple and efficient use of the data for different users (scientists, administration, citizens) through specific dashboards and extractions. This article presents this infrastructure through environmental monitoring use cases related to water resources.

This paper describes the successes and failures after 4 years of continuous operation of a network of sensors, communicating nodes, and gateways deployed on the Etna Volcano in Sicily since 2019, including a period of Etna intense volcanic activity that occurred in 2021 and resulted in over 60 paroxysms. It documents how the installation of gateways at medium altitude allowed for data collection from sensors up to the summit craters. Most of the sensors left on the volcanic edifice during winters and during this period of intense volcanic activity were destroyed, but the whole gateway infrastructure remained fully operational, allowing for a very fruitful new field campaign two years later, in August 2023. Our experience has shown that the best strategy for IoT deployment on very active and/or high-altitude volcanoes like Etna is to permanently install gateways in areas where they are protected both from meteorological and volcanic hazards, that is mainly at the foot of the volcanic edifice, and to deploy temporary sensors and communicating nodes in the more exposed areas during field trips or in the summer season.