Agriculture and digital sustainability: A digitization footprint

The growing availability and capabilities of sensing and communication infrastructures such as monitoring stations, proximal and remote sensing technologies, geolocation systems, and standard communication protocols, along with apparently decreasing costs of the same technologies are pushing widespread collection, implementation, transmission and use of digitized information in agriculture. Such an uncontrolled process poses questions on sustainability of the virtual environment (i.e. a software-based space) where such processes take place. The aim of the present work is to introduce a digitization footprint (DF), which parameterizes the amount of digital information so as to quantify the specific or general use of digital or processing information in terms of volumes, time, efforts or costs invested for data storage, processing or transfer. Such a digitization footprint can be directly related to the availability and suitability of the digital resources in terms of costs (storage, transfer, processing, cloud computing), and speed (processing, upload, download), and can help define pathways for effective and widespread development.