A novel ICT-based system for camel husbandry for online monitoring, phenotyping and rangeland assessment

Abstract Road accidents, rangeland, and a lack of data for herd management are some of the issues that face camel breeding in Iran. We created SARBANYAR, a web-based and mobile-integrated system for remote rangeland assessment, data recording, and camel tracking. SARBANYAR reduced the risk of accidents through SMS alerts, enabled real-time GPS monitoring, and offered a machine learning-based weight estimation tool (Partial Nonlinear Least Squares Support Vector Machine (PNLSVM), accuracy 94.9%, RMSE 18.5 kg) in trials involving 15 herds. Using the Mann–Kendall test, analysis of soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) trends from 2016 to 2023 revealed no significant changes in SAVI across 15 studied herds in Yazd, South Khorasan, and Kerman provinces. It identified soil moisture, region, and grazing month as key factors influencing SAVI, while camel grazing had a comparatively minimal direct impact on SAVI. The training platform had a high user engagement rate, and deploying the trackers was affordable. SARBANYAR demonstrates how ICT can enhance camel husbandry in arid areas and provides a long-term solution for increasing output and ensuring the well-being of camels, thereby paving the way for future research and development.