Biomass Business

Biomass Business I

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Funding Body

Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI)

Overview of project and proposed outcomes

This project encapsulates 4 distinct activities, each involving their own group of industry partners.  Activity #1 ("Water and Fertiliser Use Efficiency") seeks to use precision agriculture tools and techniques to formulate enterprise-relevant, spatially-enabled measures of water and fertilizer use efficiency in crop and animal production, including plant canopy-based indicators of fertility status and biomass, and develop/refine sensors and protocols necessary to acquire these measurements. Activities #2, and #3 ("Tools that improve Pasture Use efficiency"  will also create large and small scale, spatially-enabled, measurement and interpretation protocols, and a knowledge/data access system, for managing stocking rate on monoculture and composite grazing lands (including rangelands) based on measures of pasture growth and availability. Activity #4 ("Carbon and biomass inventory tools for scattered trees in farmscapes") will explore and establish techniques for data acquisition and fusion to describe vegetative carbon and biomass across entire production enterprises (farmscapes), including the development of high-definition inventory measurement and interpretation protocols for carbon and biomass on farms at sub-paddock scale.

Project participants

University of New England, Curtin University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Milne Agrigroup, Sundown Pastoral Company, Ecological Australia, Superair, Twynam Agriculture, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (NSW OEH), Western Australian Land Information Authority (Landgate WA)

Key contact person details

Dr Karl Andersson, UNE-PARG 6773 3545 , kander46@une.edu.au