Modern agriculture is facing unique challenges in building a sustainable future for food production, in which the reliable detection of plantation threats is of critical importance. The breadth of existing information sources, and their equivalent sensors, can provide a wealth of data which, to be useful, must be transformed into actionable knowledge. Approaches based on Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have been shown to be able to help farmers and related stakeholders make decisions on problems by examining large volumes of data while assessing multiple criteria. In this paper, we address the automated identification (and count the instances) of the major threat of olive trees and their fruit, the Bactrocera Oleae (a.k.a. Dacus) based on images of the commonly used McPhail trap’s contents. Accordingly, we introduce the “Dacus Image Recognition Toolkit” (DIRT), a collection of publicly available data, programming code samples and web-services focused at supporting research aiming at the management the Dacus as well as extensive experimentation on the capability of the proposed dataset in identifying Dacuses using Deep Learning methods. Experimental results indicated performance accuracy (mAP) of 91.52% in identifying Dacuses in trap images featuring various pests. Moreover, the results also indicated a trade-off between image attributes affecting detail, file size and complexity of approaches and mAP performance that can be selectively used to better tackle the needs of each usage scenario.

The support and development of the primary agri-food sector is receiving increasing attention. The complexity of modern farming issues has lead to the widespread penetration of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Decision Support Systems (DSS). IPM DSSs are heavily dependent on numerous conditions of the agro-ecological environment used for cultivation. To test and validate IPM DSSs, permanent crops, such as olive cultivation, are very important, thus this work focuses on the pest that is most potentially harmful to the olive tree and fruit: the olive fruit fly. Existing research has indicated a strong dependency on both temperature and relative humidity of the olive fruit fly’s population dynamics but has not focused on the localised environmental/climate conditions (microclimates) related to the pest’s life-cycle. Accordingly, herein we utilise a collection of a wide-range of integrated sensory and manually tagged datasets of environmental, climate and pest information. We then propose an effective and efficient two-stage assignment of sensory records into clusters representing microclimates related to the pest’s life-cycle, based on statistical data analysis and neural networks. Extensive experimentation using the two methods was applied and the results were very promising for both parts of the proposed methodology. The identified microclimates in the experimentation were shown to be consistent with intuitive and real data collected in the field, while their qualitative evaluation also indicates the applicability of the proposed method to real-life uses.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already penetrated an ever-increasing array of daily aspects of life. IoTs bridge the analog and digital worlds in an unprecedented manner and degree by providing in situ sensing. Adding to the IoT the capability to collect interrelated multi-modal sensing, the use of the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMTs) has recently been exhibited to significantly enhance the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in numerous applications, and most importantly in agrifood systems. In this work, we review key recent works in the conjunction of the three domains of IoMT, agrifood and precision agriculture and present open research directions.

Smart irrigation is an operational technology (OT) problem as much as an Internet of Things (IoT) one: software decisions act directly on valves, pumps, pressure and water delivery, so a spoofed reading or a replayed command has physical consequences. This paper presents a technology-neutral reference architecture that makes those consequences controllable. It is organised into seven functional layers and three cross-cutting planes, six trust-boundary classes that fix which properties must be re-established at each crossing, and an auditable crown-asset inventory with an explicit trust-level rubric. Two governing execution principles enforce this structure: local safety authority, which keeps final actuation permission at the field gateway, remote terminal unit (RTU) or programmable logic controller (PLC), and feedback-aware execution, which treats a command as complete only when independent physical feedback confirms it. Building on process-aware and safety-supervision ideas from industrial control, the architecture makes physical confirmation a mandatory completion condition at the local enforcement point, which catches a fully authorised command that is nonetheless physically unsafe, a failure mode that authorisation checks alone cannot detect. These properties are examined through a deterministic, openly available software proof-of-concept that verifies the design against its own acceptance criteria; it is not a field validation. The software executes six attack and failure scenarios plus one nominal-operation control against an intentionally unsecured negative control and a secure controller, under identical, controlled conditions: the negative control is compromised in all 6 attack scenarios and the secure controller in 0/6, with 0/1 false positives on legitimate operation. Analytically, the design costs 21 bytes and 50–60% additional Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) time-on-air per record, and 78% of single-step perturbations of the trust-scoring inputs leave asset classification unchanged: the actuator class (A2) is completely stable, and the gateway/RTU/PLC class (A3) is stable under 6 of 7 admissible perturbations (86%), changing only when its credential/update authority reaches the trust-anchor threshold. A sensor-level mapping from sampling rate, measurement drift and physical fault modes to the edge-verification controls they dictate, provisions for secure time, counter recovery and the choice between fail-closed and fail-open safe states, an illustrative hypothetical worked deployment example, and a transfer of the model to greenhouse, fertigation, livestock-watering and cold-chain settings show how the architecture could be applied in practice.

Smart agriculture is a key application domain of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), where cyber–physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-driven analytics converge to improve productivity, sustainability, and resource efficiency. In this context, large volumes of sensor data collected in the field form the basis for automated monitoring, decision support, and adaptive control across agricultural processes. However, the value of such data depends not only on sensing technologies and connectivity, but also on how data are generated, transferred, processed, and interpreted throughout their lifecycle. This paper is organized in two parts. The first part reports a narrative review of the literature, based on a documented search protocol, and provides an overview of sensor data and sensor data transmission networks in smart agriculture. It examines the main challenges, potentials, and limitations associated with IoT-based field deployments in 4IR environments, and consolidates them into ten open problems. These problems are ordered from the device layer to the socio-economic layer and span physical robustness, device security, rural connectivity, aerial sensing, interoperability, labelled-data scarcity, explainability, federated access control, data ownership, and cost. The second part responds to these open problems with the conceptualization of a layered architecture and a set of design proposals, covering hierarchical edge security, offline-first synchronization, semantic interoperability, explainable decision support, and farmer-centric data governance, that are grounded in established techniques and standards but have not been implemented or empirically validated in this work; they are intended as a design blueprint and a starting point for future prototyping and evaluation rather than as measured results. The paper is accordingly positioned as a conceptual, perspective-oriented contribution: it states the procedure by which the open problems were derived from the reviewed works, it states what the proposed integration is claimed to add over existing smart-agriculture architectures, and it sets out an evaluation plan that fixes the metrics and the baselines against which each proposed component would have to be tested. Throughout both parts, particular attention is given to the role of data integrity and provenance as foundational elements for trustworthy agricultural data, enabling reliable analysis, auditability, and long-term reuse. By synthesizing current approaches, open issues, and conceptual solution patterns, this paper aims to support the design of resilient, transparent, and future-ready smart agriculture systems aligned with the principles of the 4IR.