Researchers at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, are leading the five-year 'Landscapes' program, looking at the health and function of Australia's natural and managed ecosystems.
Administered through the innovative TERN project (Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network), the team will deliver important soil and landscape environmental data to support sustainable ecosystem management.
TERN, which is managed by The University of Queensland (UQ) is a national observatory for Australia's land-based ecosystems.
The research infrastructure project connects ecosystem scientists, enabling them to contribute, share and integrate data across disciplines and increase the capacity of the Australian science community to contribute to effective management and sustainable use of our ecosystems.
The soil and landscapes environmental data CSIRO delivers will benefit research and the development of tools, policy, products evaluation and management.
CSIRO Project Lead, Dr Ben Macdonald, said the five-year program of work would support monitoring and research on the condition of Australia's land-based ecosystems.
"By utilising survey results, satellite and sensor data, we are able to develop standardised protocols, tools and models," Dr Macdonald said.
TERN Australia Director Dr Beryl Morris said CSIRO has been contributing to the work of the network for over a decade, managing the Landscapes program – one of the observatory's four platforms for environmental monitoring, landscape observation and modelling and synthesis activities.
"Critical to TERN's success has been cross platform collaboration to develop new environment monitoring methods and data sets and CSIRO has helped us do this."
Dr Macdonald said TERN more broadly provides valuable cross-institutional ecological data infrastructure capability in Australia.
"We have quality data that is spatially explicit, specific to regions and incorporates vegetation, water, carbon, biodiversity and soils information datasets," he said.
"Through data such as the Soil Moisture Integration and Prediction Systems (SMIPS) and Actual Evapotranspiration data (AET), CSIRO provides access to science infrastructure capability in Australia, which complements other TERN facilities to ensure continental data calibration and validation."
TERN will incorporate microbial-driven processes and termite dynamics into soil biogeochemical cycling in the future, with a focus on developing a next-generation process-based modelling framework. This framework will capture variations of carbon and nitrogen across Australian landscapes over time.
CSIRO TERN work will utilise the Australian Government's National Soil Action Plan outputs, the Australia National Soil Information System and the National Soil Monitoring Program, to develop new dynamic soil function datasets and an update of the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia.
Dr Macdonald said Australia needs a way to map, monitor and predict trajectories of its natural and modified ecosystems at regional and national scales, in a consistent and repeatable way.
"TERN and the CSIRO Landscapes Platform is developing new infrastructure and tools towards this goal," he said.
"TERN Landscapes is also working to deliver a biodiversity index which will extract the signal of biodiversity change from unstructured spatiotemporal data."
CSIRO's involvement in TERN directly supports Australian Government priorities to assist in the delivery of large scale scientific and collaborative research in enhancing the resilience, sustainable use and value of our environments as well as food security and quality.
TERN is funded by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
