Case Study – The Mulloon Institute – Integrated monitoring system design

The Mulloon Institute is an Australian not-for-profit dedicated to research, education, and advocacy in landscape restoration. Guided by the vision of connecting environment, farming and society through practical demonstration’, the organisation is working toward a bold national goal: regenerating 100 landscapes across 10 years. That translates to restoring 2.5 million hectares of land, returning 1.25 million ML of water to Australian floodplains, and repairing more than 1,000 km of degraded creeks  and riverbanks.

The Mulloon Rehydration Initiative (MRI) is one of The Mulloon Institute’s flagship research projects, focused on demonstrating the measurable benefits of landscape rehydration at catchment scale. The Mulloon Institute brought HydroTerra on to design and build the monitoring system from the ground up — one capable of producing trusted, traceable data to support long-term research into catchment health and agricultural productivity.

The starting point was identifying The Mulloon Institute’s indicators of catchment health and productivity, then working backwards to define the parameters needed to calculate them. With that framework established, HydroTerra designed and implemented a monitoring network to match.

The resulting network comprises two climate stations, 80 automated piezometers, five stream gauging and water quality stations, and 40 soil moisture monitoring sites. Remote sensing of vegetation health, RARC assessments of stream condition, and a range of ecological assessments complement the automated network, with all data streams incorporated into a unified research platform.

Delivering the system required a structured methodology across six workstreams:
• Develop and validate monitoring methods
• Evaluate and select appropriate technologies
• Optimise integration across the technology ecosystem
• Document data management and quality assurance workflows
• Establish a metadata framework to underpin data provenance and traceability
• Achieve remote oversight through targeted hardware and software selection
• Leverage third-party publishing platforms to streamline open data access.

This is a long-term research site designed to support collaborative inquiry into sustainable agriculture and natural resource management. We’re proud of what has been built here, and we look forward to continuing this partnership with The Mulloon Institute as the data begins to tell its story.