Mike_Grundy

Mike Grundy: The Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia uses some quite remarkable opportunities and technology for Australia to understand its landscapes in a quite new way.

The partners in the project imagined what the future could and should look like. Effectively we’ve jumped to the future rather than built from the past but to get there we’ve made the most of this great richness of our historic legacy data.

We’ve used the opportunities here that have arisen from the great advances in information technology to make sure that this information is easily, freely, fully accessible to anyone who wants to use it and in any way they want to use it.

This has been the result of a major collaborative effort, one of the largest ever attempted in Australian soil science, includes CSIRO, state and federal governments, University of Sydney, Geoscience Australia and the glue that the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (that we call TERN) was able to provide.

We built this new form of soil information in this way because it is clear that this sort of information is what’s needed to underpin the decision making processes around our social, economic and environmental futures.