Intersect is developing tools that capture data from a variety of different sensors within the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources.
The Faculty of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources (FAFNR) has five projects focusing on data capture. A standards-based interoperable body of data is proposed, covering data from sensors on soil, water and rain, greenhouse gas and carbon data, and weather. The aim is to develop generic and extensible tools integrating appropriate standards across the projects, to include:
• Soil moisture, soil and air temperature, radiation, 3D wind speed and directions, CO2, water vapour, weather and tree water use data, greenhouse gas emissions from soils
• GPS-referenced data on wheat and barley crop inputs and performance
• Soil data from sensing system for monitoring of agro-ecosystems for sustainable landscape
• Soil data and spatial prediction functions for soil variables
• Data from farm-based private rain gauges.
Intersect is developing a modular toolkit serving the cluster, resulting in a set of tools that can integrate this existing data, can be expanded to incorporate new data from different instruments, and has the potential to extend to different disciplines.
In each case data and metadata will be captured from instruments or sensors. Tools will be developed to enable the addition of descriptive metadata conforming to properties and vocabularies specified by international standards. Tools will also be developed to enable researchers at FAFNR and elsewhere to compare data sets, via visualisation.
This project is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative.