Sensor Nodes Deployment Strategy for Monitoring Roadside Biomass Carbon Stocks of Tourism Destination: A Case of Wulong World Natural Heritage, China

Since the late 1978s, China has experienced one of the highest tourism growth rates in the world, which in turn has driven extensive land-use and land-cover change. The aim of this research is to develop a sensor nodes positioning strategy for detecting land use related dynamics of vegetation carbon stocks of Wulong world natural heritage. Based on the assessment of road networks’ influences on biomass carbon stocks, roadside biomass carbon stocks risk index was proposed as a sensor deployment strategy to identify the optimal positions of the sensors to detect the changes in vegetation carbon stocks. Forest and cropland around the lower levels of roads should be the most important region of sensor nodes deployment strategy. The results generated from this study have the ability to achieve optimal solution of spatial positioning problem with minimum number of sensors in biomass carbon monitoring sensor networks. This analysis appears to have great potential for a wide range of practical applications in tourism industry in China.