Is it MATRIX? No, it's Australia!

Australia is among countries which the most effectively follow a global trend to digitalize data from surrounding world. This trend is about collecting, analysing and sharing information about for example natural environment conditions, land management or on-going economic processes. Such project in Sense-T covering Tasmania island for five years. Implemented at the University of Tasmania in cooperation with Australian agency for science affairs CSIRO and Tasmanian government, Sense-T register current information in areas of agriculture, aquaculture, healthcare, tourism, logistic and urbanization.

For collection of data from environment and economy, plenty of innovative technologies are developed by commercial and academic partners. Data, being processed in the real time, are being gathered in a cloud and shared with interested receivers. The aim is to obtain multidimensional picture of what is happening around us – to better plan and implement research projects, infrastructure, predict harvest scale or analyse environment pollution. Sense-T helps to predict in an intelligent way how fuel price affects transport and availability of fresh food or how actual atmospheric conditions affect availability of natural products and meal prices in restaurants. The idea of Sense-T is presented on animation below:

Researchers involved in Sense-T are for example equipped with thousands of sensors measuring soil moisture, temperature at various depths, above ground temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and leaf wetness. Another device measures… the heartbeats of oysters. Information about oyster wellbeing is useful to optimize their breeding, since seafood production is very important for Tasmanian economy. Monitoring and processing data from environment also allows to forecast pasture field space. Another example is a monitoring of a supply chain to indicate factors vital for food stability.

Not only Tasmania has a chance to become one big laboratory. Australian government is running a 10-year research programme “Oznome” aiming to become “historical, current and future digital representation of everything” in the country by 2025, starting with environmental data. A research team leader at CSIRO, David Lemon, describes the project as crazy and anticipate that many people will say it isn’t possible. The programme will for sure encounter many technological obstacles, however he  hopes for an interdisciplinary cooperation of scientists and experts in processing huge amounts of data – an area which is actually accelerating nowadays.

The general idea of Sense-T and Oznome is based on American project NEON (The National Ecological Observatory Network) which helps to monitor ecological data in continental scale since 2011. NEON gathers data from 106 terrestrial and aquatic field sites in 20 ecoclimatic domains. A complete construction of this platform is planned before the end of 2017, but since 2015 already collected data are deposited in NEON Data portal. Data including for example plant presence and percent cover, chemical properties of surface- and groundwater or small mammals box trapping for given time period are available in csv files format.

Similar programme in European Union is called Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE). Project has begun with a directive in 2007. Its idea is to provide access to European infrastructure in the field of environment protection, international  land management or reacting during ecological crisis. The effect of European countries cooperation will be GeoPortal providing quick access  to such information in xml format.

The need to digitalize surrounding world is a special sign of our times. Probably one frightened would ask is this already MATRIX? Another one would use such data in creative and practical way, limited only by human imagination.

Monika Kossakowska-Zwierucho

Sources:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076539-australias-plan-to-make-a-digital-representation-of-everything/
http://www.neoninc.org/
http://www.sense-t.org.au/
http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm
https://research.csiro.au/oznome/