Resumen
In order to guarantee high-quality agricultural products and food safety, efforts must be made to manage and maintain healthy agricultural environments under the myriad of risks that they face. Three central system components of sustainable agricultural management schemes are real-time monitoring, decision-making, and remote access. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems are a convenient means of providing both these and other functions, such as wireless sensor networking, mobile phone applications, etc., to agricultural management schemes. ICT systems have significantly improved in recent years and have been widely used in many fields, including environmental monitoring and management. Moreover, ICT could benefit agricultural environment management by providing a platform for collaboration between researchers and stakeholders, thereby improving agricultural practices and environments. This article reviews and discusses the way in which ICT can efficiently improve monitoring systems and risk assessments of agricultural environment monitoring, as well as the technological and methodological improvements of ICT systems. Finally, we develop and apply an ICT system, referred to as the agricultural environment protection system?comprised of a cloud, six E-platforms, three mobile devices, automatic monitoring devices, indigenous wireless sensor nodes, and gateways in agricultural networks?to a case study in the Taoyuan irrigation district, which acts as a pilot area in Taiwan. Through the system, we use all available information from the interdisciplinary structured cloud database to classify the focal area into different agricultural environmental risk zones. We also conducted further analysis based on a hierarchical approach in order to classify the agricultural environments in the study area, to allocate additional sampling with resin packages and mobile devices, as well as to assist decision makers and stakeholders. The main contributions that the system provides include a technical innovation platform (suitable for integrating innovations), economic benefits, and societal benefits.