RFID Aids Restoration of Australian Rainforest

The project represents a collaboration between ARCS, the Queensland Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's national science research agency. The Springbrook site, chosen because of plans to restore sections of it from agricultural grassland to native rainforest vegetation, displays a wide range of environmental gradients ideal for assessing the technology's suitability.

The project, Keto says, is particularly important because, although rainforests make up just 0.3 percent of the Australian continent, more than half of the nation's plant and animal species rely upon the complex forests.

Aila Keto

The EPA is determining how and where to implement the wireless sensor network for optimal results. Jonathan Hodge, the agency's project manager, says monitoring the restoration work will provide information about biodiversity recovery on land, and deliver insight into how and why the recovery of fauna and flora occurs.

"This will result in restoration of World Heritage values on the Springbrook Plateau," Hodge says, "and the restored land will ultimately connect sections of the national park, which have previously been split by areas of agricultural grassland. In the future, wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring may provide a cost-effective alternative that can deliver information resulting in a greater understanding of ecological processes and the process of restoration."

CSIRO designed the system, which utilizes the organization's third-generation Fleck nodes to form a wireless mesh network. Each node activates its sensors and samples the environment at set intervals. Then, operating at the 915 MHz radio frequency band, the node relays the information back to the base station—either directly, or by hopping the transmission along other network nodes. The data is collated at a gateway point, located in a house on-site, and forwarded via the Internet to a central database, thanks to Telstra's Next G cellular communications network.

"We chose the 915 MHz band because it offers a long range of up to several hundred meters," says Tim Wark, CSIRO's team leader. "Even in dense foliage, the range between nodes is up to 100 meters [328 feet]."

In designing the Fleck nodes, CSIRO built its own network protocols to enable the organization to alter the network and overcome the unique problems inherent to operating in a rainforest. CSIRO plans to make the Fleck wireless sensor platform commercially available next year.