  Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
technologies help ecosystem monitoring to shift towards automated monitoring
with low power sensors and embedded vision on powerful processing units.
Vision-based monitoring devices need an effective power management and control
system (PMCS) with system-adapted power input and output capabilities to
achieve power-efficient and self-sustainable operation. Here, we present a
universal power management solution for automated ecosystem monitoring devices,
compatible with commonly used off-the-shelf edge processing units (EPUs). The
proposed design is specifically adapted for battery-powered EPU systems by
incorporating power-matched energy harvesting (EH), a power switch with
low-power sleep mode, and simple system integration in an MCU-less architecture
with automated operation. We use a 4-month environmental case study to monitor
plant growth under 4mg microplastic (MP) exposure, demonstrating that the setup
achieved continuous and sustainable operation. In this plant phenology case
study, our power management module is deployed in an embedded vision camera
equipped with a 5W solar panel and five various environmental sensors. This
work shows the usability of the power management board in environmentally
relevant use cases and for tasks in agricultural applications.
