A review of Federation University Australia's research and engagement in Digital Agriculture

1. Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation
A/Prof Peter Dahlhaus
A/Prof Helen Thompson
10st February 2017

2. Federation University Australia
Origins: 1870 Ballarat School of Mines
Campuses: Ballarat, Gippsland, Wimmera, Berwick,
Brisbane, Malaysia
Faculties & Schools:
(dual sector)
• Business
• Education & Arts
• Health
• Science & Technology
• Industry Skills
• Federation College

3. Federation University Australia
University of New England
University of Southern Queensland
Southern Cross University
Central Queensland University
University of the Sunshine Coast
Precision Agriculture Flagship
Water Landscapes Future
Collaboration: research, PhD students, facilities

4. Centre for eResearch and
Digital Innovation
CeRDI - www.cerdi.edu.au
~ 30 staff: multidisciplinary mix of researchers,
technical, support and administration
Unaligned to Faculties - report to DVCR

5. x =
CeRDI capability: eResearch
National &
FedUni
research
priorities
CeRDI
Government,
industry and
community
needs
Research
expertise
Technological
expertise
Real world
applications

6. A variety of applications:
agriculture, biodiversity, catchment management, citizen science, climate change,
endangered species, emergency management, fire, groundwater, history, municipal
information, natural resource management, regional planning, sports participation, etc.
Allows integration of cross-disciplinary data sets
spatial.federation.edu.au
CeRDI capability:
spatial data portals

8. Depth to watertable
www.vvg.org.au
Federates around 80 groundwater data
sets from 8 custodians. Some data are
real-time, some are scheduled
updates, some are linked data

9. Bore parameters
Information on over 400,000
bores accessed from the source
databases

10. Predicted depth to watertable and
groundwater quality

11. 3d model of aquifers

12. 204,146 Sessions
83,135 Users
488,852 Pageviews
60% Returning visitors
Primary impact
Site usage has grown:
• 43% industry users,
• 20% government,
• 11% community,
• 11% water authority,
• 10% research.
Analytics

13. Practice impact: reduced time finding data, preparing data, responding to enquiries.
Sector impact: changed data custodian’s thoughts on how to provision data.
http://jh.iwaponline.com/content/18/2/238Journal of Hydroinformatics (open access)
“VVG technology provides an opportunity to add extra
data sets without having to rebuild.”

14. International data interoperability standards
Groundwater Interoperability Experiment 2 (GW2IE)
Soil Data Interoperability Experiment (Soil IE)
Collaborators include: CSIRO, European Commission, US Department Agriculture,
World Soil Information (ISRIC), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Landcare
Research NZ, Geological Surveys of US, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand,
Poland, UK, etc.

15. data.cerdi.edu.au/soil_demo.php
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 2015
soil data interoperability experiment.
Designing, implementing and testing a
soil data exchange standard.

16. The Research and Innovation Network for
Precision Agriculture Systems

17. www.farmtrials.com.au
Federating farm trial data for all Australia

18. www.croppro.com.au
Crop disease diagnostics and information

19. agprice.grainandgraze3.com.au
Historical commodity price metrics

20. www.swclimatechange.com.au
Climate change predictions
(spatial), impacts and
adaptation information.

21. www.ozdsm.com.au
Digital soil mapping
(PhD project completed 2016)

22. probetrax.sfs.org.au
Soil moisture and temperature probes (telemetered data)
Includes SMS/email alert services

24. www.ccmaknowledgebase.vic.gov.au/soilhealth
Soil eLibrary (grey documents, webpages, videos, etc.)
Spatial mapping portal (maps, tests, profiles, etc.)

25. Federating soil data from SLGA & DEDJTR

26. http://ccma.tism.cecc.com.au/ccma_shkb/soilprop_viz.php
Community contributed soil test data

27. Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation www.cerdi.edu.au 27
CeRDI capability in eResearch
Collaborate with our research, industry and community partners:
To take advantage of the eResearch tools to:
 Interoperably integrate data (open data, research data, big data, sensor
data, legacy data, crowdsourced data… any data)
 Answer the frequently asked data/information questions
 Dynamically generate conceptual and predictive models
 Make new discoveries and avoid repeating past research
 Measure the impacts on decision making and facilitate practice change

28. 28
CeRDI collaborative investment opportunities in eResearch
Opportunities exist for the CBA to co-invest with our research, industry and
community partners in:
Centre of Excellence?
CRCs?