The issue of illegal water drainage directly into canals is one of the major factors that pollutes water bodies and hence affects the environment and human health. On the other hand, the uncontrolled spread of water hyacinth in water bodies affects the level of oxygen in water and hence kills fish in the water body. However, the conventional approach to water body and canal monitoring involves manual inspection, which is time-consuming and does not allow real-time monitoring of the water body and its surroundings. In this paper, we propose an A IoT-based approach to water body and canal monitoring that can detect cases of illegal water drainage and water hyacinth spread in real time using artificial intelligence and IoT technology and LoRa wireless technology as the medium of communication among the nodes in the water body and the gateway node and the cloud server. Experimental results on a small water body show that the proposed approach can be scaled up to effectively and efficiently monitor water bodies and can hence contribute to the sustainability of water resources in the world.