The Centre for the Environment’s Ecological Monitoring Program develops technologies and processes to observe and record our environments, fauna and flora and enable effective conservation efforts at the landscape scale.
Most environmental issues, like climate change, land clearing, agricultural intensification, urban sustainability, natural resource management and invasive species spread, are better managed at landscape scales. However, environmental data at these large scales is often unavailable and when available it is sparse and patchy.
Sensors and other automated data collection devices, coupled with new techniques to integrate, analyse and visualise these new big data streams, have opened new and exciting areas of research that focus on broad spatial and temporal scales.
Real-world innovation
Our program builds on QUT’s expertise in the application, technology and human areas necessary for transforming ecological monitoring and our projects encompass a wide range of landscape-scale ecological monitoring.
- Acoustic fauna monitoring
- Automated wildlife detection using drones
- Reef monitoring
- Greenhouse gas monitoring
- Automated and robotic sensors including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs)
- Smart sensors including acoustics, greenhouse gas, soil and air quality sensors
- Spatial science, visualisation and data management
- Human in the loop and citizen science monitoring approaches.