Natural Environment

CeRDI’s eResearch in the Natural Environment collaborative research program spans a range of areas, including groundwater, soil health, water and estuary health, natural resource management planning and biodiversity, reflective of the multidisciplinary nature of CeRDI's research as well as long-term collaborative research relationships with a diverse range of industry and government partners.

Research Context

Referred to as the New Digital Age (Schmidt and Cohen 2013), or era of Big Data (e.g. Boyd and Crawford 2012; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013) the present time period provides unprecedented opportunities for a deeper understanding and appreciation of our global environments. The volume of digital data on natural environments has grown exponentially, especially in the physical (e.g. Lynch 2008; Bell et al. 2009) and environmental sciences (e.g. Porter et al. 2012) where much of it is collected by sensors. In addition, data availability has vastly improved as governments in many countries adopt open data policies (Zuiderwijk and Janssen 2014).

Ubiquitous internet technologies provide access to all this data, particularly when that information is delivered on demand via high speed broadband to mobile tablet devices. These technologies have created a society that is spatially enabled and aware. Big business and citizens increasingly expect to be able to access past and current information about any location of interest, to find answers to their spatial queries. Deeper appreciation and understanding comes from the sheer volume of information that can be amassed about any particular place in the landscape, and how that information can be dynamically synthesised to provide the most definitive answer to the user's question.

Hence the use of spatial digital technologies for a more holistic understanding of river catchments, landscapes, biodiversity and environmental sustainability are rapidly emerging areas of eResearch. Recent examples in the international scientific literature include: the UK's Environmental Virtual Observatory project (EVO) which aims to make environmental data more visible and accessible for catchment management (Gurney et al. 2011) and includes visualisation tools for communicating flood risk (e.g. Wilkinson et al. 2013); the web delivery of interoperable water data with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards (e.g. Boston et al. 2015); landscape visualisations that integrate GIS with augmented reality (e.g. Ghadirian and Bishop 2008); and 3D landscape visualisations for participatory landscape planning (e.g. Wissen et al. 2008; Salter et al. 2009). Experimental tools that use sensors for weed management (e.g Thorp and Tian 2004; Berge et al. 2012), or soil moisture (e.g. Phillips et al. 2014); or monitoring fauna (e.g. Di Cerbo and Biancardi 2013), have also been developed. Similarly, experiments with novel deployment of sensors, such as using unmanned vehicles to improve environmental data collection (e.g. de Sousa and Andrade Goncalves 2011); portable laser scanners for environmental monitoring (e.g. Zlot et al. 2014) and 3D, 4D and augmented reality visualisations, usually at iconic heritage sites (e.g. Guhathakurta et al. 2009; Norris et al. 2014; Petty et al. 2014), have also been published. And a plethora of websites and mobile applications (Apps) are now available to assist the ecologist, farmer, pedologist and hydrologist in on-ground decision making.

With the global shift to smaller governments, an increasing volume of data and most of the decision tools (such as Apps) are now generated in the private sector, particularly the service industries in the environmental, water, energy and agricultural sectors.