Empowering land managers with wireless soil monitoring

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Empowering land managers with wireless soil monitoring. [Online] (Updated June 25th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/2999 [Accessed Tuesday 12th of March 2013 01:56:50 PM ].

Effective management of soil water requires a knowledge of its status as well as an interpretation of how its status should affect management decisions. Lack of both of these has limited landholders’ ability to manage soil water in the past.

The challenges for soil water research are therefore to deliver to farmers and other land managers methods for obtaining soil water content data that require little technical expertise on their part, are cheap, are easily installed, require little time and effort to obtain and are available whenever required.

The advent of inexpensive wireless technology and the widespread adoption of the internet for information delivery have provided a means for addressing these challenges. Our vision is for inexpensive soil water sensors and data loggers buried below the depth of cultivation transmitting data wirelessly to a central web server which automatically presents the data in a variety of formats, provides a basic level of interpretation, and allows the consequences of various management strategies to be explored by use of simple on-line models.

This project advances the above vision in two important ways. Firstly we will enhance the inexpensive wireless data logging systems that we have already developed so that they can be completely buried thus causing no obstruction to paddock operations. Secondly we will develop a soil water sensor that avoids some of the problems with existing sensors, is easily installed and is cheaper than existing comparable sensors.

Project Objectives

Develop a new soil water sensor easily installed at depths of up to ~ 2m, delivering
quantitative measurements of soil water for less than $50 per depth.
Develop a new wireless data logging system that can be completely buried, thus causing no obstruction to paddock operations
Encourage adoption of the new equipment and techniques.