Novel Smart Water Quality Monitoring System for Iraqi Rivers and Marshes

Water is an essential natural source for sustaining mankind’s life and environment. Due to the rising demand and pollution, more than 5 billion people could be impacted by a water crisis by 2025. In recent times, water pollution has become one of the major challenges, as it is decreasing the drinking water available for consumption. This paper proposes an Arduino-based sensory system and a sensor network scheme for monitoring Iraqi wetlands water quality online. The proposed system aims to replace the conventional way of monitoring water quality, which fails at real-time data generation and is time-consuming, to cover a greater water area (such as rivers, marshes, and lakes) through various mobile sensor nodes on the same network. The system achieves real-time monitoring depending on the Internet of Things and a wireless sensor network to determine the water’s pH level, total dissolved solids, temperature, and turbidity or conductivity to enable the river or marsh environment monitors to send the acquired data online to a hosting server. The proposed system is composed of a microcontroller unit (MCU) that interfaces with all connected sensors, while further processing is carried out on a personal computer. The SQL server database receives the sensors using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module (Node MCU). The data is collected and uploaded to a specially designed website in real-time and also displayed on a map using ArcGIS for Power BI. The marshes’ environment monitoring authority can use the projected data to support the decision support process.