Digital Transformation in the Agriculture Sector

Dear Colleagues,

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has expressed its concern because of growing population and urbanization which has impacted in the global food production. Digital technologies can improve traditional agriculture by reducing water and nutrient consumption, avoiding the need of large crop areas and adjusting environmental parameters as desired, among others. Traditionally, the agriculture sector has integrated digital technologies for managing irrigation systems or forecasting weather conditions, but recent developments in the area of communications, computation and artificial intelligence can further improve areas such as precision agriculture and spread automatic management of crops worldwide.

Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) developments and their evolution are transforming the paradigm of agriculture production management providing with more and more precise information allowing the agriculture industry to better understand the behavior and development of the agriculture productions and enabling farmers to meet the requirements that these productions need in each of their stages. In this manner, digital agriculture can assist with optimizing the efficiency, providing decision support systems capable of estimating a future state of the production, giving the parameters of the current trends, or even interacting with other systems thanks to interoperability components making easier to spread an isolated knowledge to nearby productions thanks to cooperative approaches.

The goal of this Special Issue is to motivate the publication of works and studies in the field of the digital transformation of the agriculture section, with emphasis on IoT-enabled solutions, interoperability, distributed computing and machine-learning-based models providing their outputs as decision support systems. Therefore, researchers are invited to submit their manuscripts to this Special Issue and contribute their solutions, models, proposals, reviews and studies.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• IoT for smart agriculture.
• Precision agriculture using ICT.
• Sustainable agriculture using digital technologies.
• Crop sensing.
• Wireless sensor networks in agriculture.
• Application of LPWAN communications in the agriculture sector.
• Crop monitoring using satellites and UAVs.
• Semantic models for smart agriculture.
• Cloud, edge and fog computing in agriculture.
• Intelligent resource allocation and decision-making tools.
• Intelligent applications for ensuring food security.
• Intelligent tools and methods for farming system design.
• Intelligent and connected vehicles in smart agriculture.
• Electronics in smart agriculture.
• Wearable devices to support farmers.
• Application of 5G/6G technologies and networks in smart agriculture.

Dr. Juan Antonio Martínez Navarro
Dr. José Santa
Dr. Andrés Muñoz
Guest Editors

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