Helping Australian Farmers Map The Future
MEDIA RELEASE
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MELBOURNE, FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2019
The Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Senator the Hon Matt Canavan, along with Federal Member for Groom, Dr John McVeigh, today announced $50,000 seed funding grants for Australian business to develop pilot projects that will leverage Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth Australia (‘DEA’) technology.
Over the last 8 years, FrontierSI has worked closely with Geoscience Australia to help spawn DEA. Geoscience Australia has now taken this research and developed it into a world-leading capability with the aim of developing innovative software and techniques, and new standards in open source data.
DEA is a key piece of public data infrastructure which uses satellite data to detect physical changes across Australia in unprecedented detail. It offers stable, standardised data from which it can innovate to produce new products and services and be competitive in global markets.
DEA Labs, a FrontierSI initiative, is a targeted incubator program for the private sector which aims to help Australian businesses use satellite data and DEA technologies to solve real-world problems through collaboration, and the provision of funding and support. It brings together end-users and the private sector to innovate and solve challenging real-world problems.
Minister Canavan said, “These Digital Earth Australia Labs collaboration projects embody the government’s agenda; using investment to help businesses get ahead by providing the services that users need.”
“Digital Earth Australia provides a snapshot of the entire Australian landscape every five days, giving us so much detail about water availability, the development of our regions and cities and the productivity of our land.”
“The value of this kind of technology to businesses is unlimited. It is through targeted collaborations like this that Australian innovation and ingenuity can shine a light on different parts of our economy.” Minister Canavan said.
Australian companies and FrontierSI partners, DataFarming and NGIS, along with AgTech company CiboLabs, will be using DEA data to automatically map paddock boundaries and capture many other features including drains, dams, vegetation and infrastructure.
“Programs like Digital Earth Australia, coming out of our science organisations, continue to deliver on the government’s ongoing investment in the digital economy and space-enabled industries.” Minister Canavan said.
More information about Digital Earth Australia and DEA Labs can be viewed at: https://frontiersi.com.au/dea/
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Media contact: FrontierSI Media Communications Manager Nic Prassopoulos | Phone +61 400 824 323 media@frontiersi.com.au
About FrontierSI
FrontierSI (formerly the CRC for Spatial Information) has a 16-year track record delivering spatial information services throughout Australia, New Zealand and around the world. Through a partnership model comprising governments, industry and the university sector, FrontierSI brings people and technology together to solve complex problems using applied geodesy, spatial infrastructures, analytics, artificial intelligence and image processing.
https://frontiersi.com.au
