Monitoring the Environment

From the effects of climate change to the spread of disease and invasive species, we’re living in a world that poses increasing threats to biodiversity, so monitoring the state of the environment has never been more important.

Australia’s size and sparse population pose a number of challenges to traditional environmental monitoring techniques.

Our work

We build and refine monitoring technologies that are both pervasive and persistent. Some of the sensing systems we use are static, some are mobile and robotic, while others are attached to the creatures that we wish to monitor. We develop platforms to visualise spatial data to enable innovation and find solutions to environmental problems.

We’ve made sensing accurate, robust and secure and have learned how to collect, store and distribute data efficiently and reliably over large and remote distances.

In remote locations, our distributed sensing systems can operate over long periods of time and across wide geographic dispersion without human intervention. We’ve developed drones to survey vast landscapes by air to scan for weeds, and systems that collect and monitor real time agricultural data. Our technology has been deployed far and wide to remote regions, including the Amazon basin.

Our monitoring technologies aren’t just found in the natural world. We develop products and platforms that mediate a range of man-made environments to improve safety, efficiency and decision-making for humans.

We’ve built robots, their design biologically inspired, which can enter collapsed buildings and confined spaces such as mines. Our suite of advanced spatial analytics technology, such as National Map, brings together dispersed data sets to enable more integrated decision-making for government, business and the public.