March Newsletter

It’s been an interesting month.  There is a lot of change in the air. Everyone is trying to work out what to do!

We have been involved with an Agtech steering committee, looking at the barriers to Ag tech adoption, we’ve had sensor developers from the US looking at what’s the best way to commercialise sensors, and we have had an insurance company looking at how many sensors to adequately predict frost risk for a new type of insurance called parametric insurance.

What do all these things have in common?  A lot of monitoring sensor providers don’t understand applications, and a lot of the customers don’t understand how to use measurement to manage!

Aligning sensors to problem solving is the value proposition of sensors. Not the sensor alone.  A good monitoring plan needs to be able to specify measurement points and extrapolate them to meaningful information for decision making, this is when adoption becomes a frenzy! Uncertainties need to be known and key parameters need to be understood. If you don’t know this, don’t blow your money on sensors! If you do know this, buy bucket loads of sensors. With all this in hand, we need to process data to create information at a scale that is useful for management.

HydroTerra is embracing this challenge, developing our monitoring system designs in collaboration with experts in statistics and spatial data analysis, to meet the curve balls of climate change that are being lobbed up at us. One thing is for sure, with climate change making a mockery of using historical data to predict the likelihood of future outcomes, we are going to need a lot more monitoring.

In this month’s newsletter we look at some old and new technologies that collectively are changing the way we monitor and generate valuable information.