The trend and future of environmental monitoring technology

The environmental monitoring technology has changed from passive logging system to intelligent networked sensor system. The sensor node measures the physical, chemical and biochemical quantities, and transfers the data to the base station by wireless sensor network. The sensor network server integrates these data as the environment datasets, and uploads to a cloud server. The technology facilitates the development of hazard detection and alert system. The examples in the natural world, agriculture and industry are reviewed in this paper. The environmental monitoring network is divided into four different categories in the scale and function. The environmental monitoring will become a standard and fundamental tool in the future society.