Last week I went on my second visit to Melbourne to work with Chris at SmartSat and the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. It’s always a blast returning to Melbourne – I lived and worked there for many years, so it’s like returning to my old home town. The city remains familiar yet different – it grows larger and stranger between the years, but it retains both fond memories for me and a sense of nascent possibility.
Swinburne Architecture
You get quite a view of Hawthorne from these buildings.
Hawthorn skyline
And inside you get a view of the whiteboard on which we did most of our work – essentially laying out what we have covered in our collaboration so far and mapping out some possibilities for future progress. Yes, it’s a bit cryptic – so I’ll unpack it with some details in the next post.
This Technical Presentation hosted by Ha Thanh Nguyen, Research Scientist in Digital Interactions (Agriculture & Food) at CSIRO explores the outcomes of SmartSat Project P3.25: Can satellites monitor crop and pasture quality across Australia?
Knowledge of crop and pasture quality can provide the industry with insights to assist with the grazing management of pastures and input management decisions for crops. Handheld and lab-based spectroscopy have been extensively employed to monitor quality-based plant attributes. The methods employed are time consuming and expensive to implement and do not provide the industry with insights into the temporal trends of the critical variables. High resolution and frequent return time can overcome numerous deficiencies affecting equivalent visible IR and SWIR platforms, that limit the ability to create a viable product around crop and pasture quality. This project conducted a feasibility analysis capitalising on existing and planned satellite missions, including the Aquawatch satellites and precursors to test development of new high frequency products for crop and pasture quality across the Australian landscape. This project is led by Dr Roger Lawes, Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Agriculture Flagship and includes participants from CSIRO and the Grains Research and Development Corporation. For more information visit https://smartsatcrc.com/research-prog…
