FAQs

Baseliner Soil is a collaboration between Bush Heritage Australia, Monash University’s Soil Science department (School of Earth, Atmosphere & Environment), and FreakLabs, a technology company focused on conservation.

The original mission of the project is to gather baseline measurements of soil on conservation lands and continuously monitor to see how it changes over time. Kate Fitzherbert, formerly of Bush Heritage, came up with the concept and mentioned that we can measure a lot through satellites, but we have no idea what’s going on underneath the ground. That was the impetus to kick off the project.

As of this writing, the project has been going on for about 4 years now. The original goal for data collection of this project was to create a data set with a 10 year time horizon to see if there is any correlation of soil parameters with climate change. We’re hoping to create a data set beyond the 10 year time horizon though.

Although there’s technology available for soil, most of it is geared towards agriculture. There isn’t a lot of technology specifically for monitoring soil on conservation lands and also meant to stay in the ground for years. Technology like this isn’t a priority for big technology companies, even though the project itself is quite large. The solution we all came up with was to put it together as part of a consortium of organizations and cooperate to bring it into existence.

A lot of the terrain that this system will go on to would be considered “resource constrained”. There is usually no infrastructure, ie: no electrical power and we consider it lucky if there is cellular communications available. Part of the technical challenge is that we have to create a basic communications and power infrastructure and then move the data across that infrastructure to the internet. The environments are also considered harsh and we’re constantly battling rain, flooding, animals, and strong UV from sunlight. All of these can easily take out the system. These types of conditions would traditionally be part of oil & gas, mining, and military technology so it’s quite interesting creating a system like this for conservation.

Kate Fitzherbert, formerly of Bush Heritage, came up with the concept of the project and emphasized that she really wanted to collect a set of “baseline measurements” for what’s going on underneath the soil. This led to the “temporary” project name of Baseliner with the understanding we’d come up with a much cooler name later. Unfortunately that day never came since there was much more work than we all had anticipated. Hence the system is called Baseliner with the designation of “Soil” since this particular collaboration is focused on using the system to measure soil.

At the moment that means using factory calibration of the soil sensors. It’s best to talk to Maille Todd and Dr. Vanessa Wong of Monash University in regards to this, because there are specific caveats to inferring absolute values using uncalibrated sensors. However if you are looking for relative measurements, ie: the soil moisture is 10% higher in May than April, then those types of measurements are possible.

In collaboration with Monash University, we’ve also created a system called Soily that allows for performance analysis, characterization, and calibration of a range of soil sensors. We are looking to extend that system to make calibration of soil sensors easier and have a version that allows non-soil scientists to accurately calibrate soil sensors to the soil on their own lands.

This would be dependent on the type of tree, but typically trees require soil moisture between 20 to 50%. There is more detailed information available from specialty charts and the internet. One of the use cases of the Baseliner Soil system is to have a soil alarm system that can alert when the soil moisture goes below a certain level and could be an early warning to a tree die off.

It’s best to consider this as an experiment question and work with a soil scientist to plan it out. For this experiment, we are measuring soil moisture at 5 cm and 30 cm and soil temperature at 5 cm. The depths can be correlated with the average root depth of the particular vegetation you’re interested in as well. 

The Baseliner Soil system was designed to be modular and compatible with as many soil sensors as possible. If there’s a particular sensor you want to interface, send us an email and we can let you know if it’s compatible or if we can help interface it to the system.

We are planning to expand the Baseliner System to measure water quality and water distribution. This will unsurprisingly be called Baseliner Water. If you’re interested in something like this and would like to be part of a pilot and/or collaboration, please get in touch with us.

Yes of course. The purpose of creating the system from scratch was to build in modularity for expansion with other sensors. Please get in touch with us about the specific sensor you’re interested in and we can let you know if it’s immediately compatible or if we can help interface it to the Baseliner system.

The local wireless nodes which connect the sensor stations to a gateway has a range of approximately 1 to 3 km depending on the terrain. The range can also be improved by changing to a specialty antenna. The Baseliner system range can also be extended by using repeaters that allow messages to “hop” from repeater to repeater.

We have developed satellite gateways and are currently testing different satellite providers. Currently we have narrowed down our providers to Argos and Iridium but will also continue testing out other satellite providers. The satellite gateways should be available in 2025.

• The sensor station battery life will depend on the sensors used. For the current configuration with two soil moisture sensors, one soil temperature sensor, and one temperature and humidity sensor monitoring the internal case, the battery life on a single charge has gone to 9 months and counting. 
• The cellular and satellite gateways are solar powered and use a small solar panel. This keeps the gateway batteries topped up, even transmitting data aggregated from all the sensor stations to the internet every 15 minutes. 
• Currently we recommend checking the system every 6 months at least though to change batteries and to make sure there isn’t a disruption in data collection.

For the current pilot with Bush Heritage in Nardoo, we are using two Vegetronix VH400 soil moisture sensors and one DS18B20 temperature sensor to measure soil temperature.

We are very interested in expanding the pilot sites as well as use cases now that the system is functional. Please contact us if you’re interested in piloting the system. We will also be holding online workshops and talks on the system periodically through the year that you can attend if you want to learn more about and test out the system.

We’re aiming for the system to be available for purchase in 2025. We’ll actually be leasing out the system which means that we’ll be responsible for hardware upgrades, software upgrades, and server development. Most organizations we work with don’t have IT staff and are generally only interested in the data so we believe this would be the easiest way to get people and organizations up and running.

We’re currently in discussion on what the pricing would be. The rough pricing would be $30 AUD/month for a sensor station and $40 AUD/month for a cellular gateway. For Bush Heritage projects, because of BHA’s participation as a co-developer, there would be significant discounts. Please contact Colin or FreakLabs directly in regards to this.

We are currently putting together documentation on how to use and manage the system. We’re also planning hands-on workshops to give people a sense of how to deploy and manage the system.

Currently it’s been piloted at multiple sites in Japan and multiple sites in Australia. A lot of the technology has also been derived from various environmental monitoring projects by FreakLabs in the Philippines, India, and Middle East.