abstract
- Pastoral activities bring several benefits to the ecosystem and rural communities. These activities are already carried out daily with goats, cows and sheep in Portugal. Still, they could be better applied to take advantage of their benefits. Most of these pastoral ecosystem services are not remunerated, indicating a lack of making these activities more attractive to bring returns to shepherds, breeders and landowners. The monitoring of these activities provides data to value these services, besides being able to indicate directly to the shepherds’ routes to drive their flocks and the respective return. There are devices in the market that perform this monitoring, but they are not adaptable to the circumstances and challenges required in the Northeast of Portugal. This work addresses a system to perform animals tracking, and the development of a test platform, through long-range technologies for transmission using LoRaWAN architecture. The results demonstrated the use of LoRaWAN in tracking services, allowing to conclude about the viability of the proposed methodology and the direction for future works.