MONITORING FARM DAMS WITH TECHNOLOGY
Monitoring Australian farm dams is an ongoing challenge.
Mapping farm dams requires machine learning applied to high-resolution satellite data.
Developing affordable and reliable sensors is key to studying farm dams.
Remote sensing
Farm dams are hard to monitor: too many, too small, and located in remote private properties. Improving current satellite methods is a necessary step to understanding the role of farm dams in the environment, with important economic and social benefits. The Blue Carbon Lab leads collaborations with Dept. Primary Industries and Regional Development, Dept. of Environment and Energy, and Deakin School of IT and Engineering to develop new tools to detect and monitor small water reservoirs. For example, we can use high-definition satellite images and deep-learning convolutional neural networks to analyse farm dam water surface, maximum surface area, surrounding catchment area, and vegetation type and cover.
We created AusDams.org – a free interactive website to share our farm dam database with the Government, farmers, scientists and the general community.
The portal is very simple: the user only needs to navigate on a map to any area of Australia to generate tailored statistics, plots and tables on various aspects of farm dams (e.g., count, density, total surface area, size distribution, water capacity).
Our portal can support research or help choose the location for new dams. To support all these applications, we are committed to expanding AusDam.org as data becomes available.
Sensory technology
Our team has developed IoT electronics to monitor greenhouse gas emissions from freshwater systems. These devices comprise a floating chamber mounted with methane sensors to monitor aquatic emissions. The concept is an improvement upon the iAMES design that was published in a scientific peer-reviewed article by Prof Damien Maher from Southern Cross University.
Our improvements include adding the electronics to monitor data in real-time online, solar panels for indefinite use, sensors to monitor methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, and a better design of the floating chamber.
