LitFuse » litfuse0208

Fibre optics for cheap, rapid environment sensors

litfuse — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:06:08 +0000

Professor Tanya Monro from University of Adelaide presented on “Application of optical fibres to environmental montoring” (4.3MB) at the recent Living Laboratories workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring, on 12 February 2008. 75 people from industry, government and research organisations attended to hear about and explore some of the emerging new technologies in ICT, genetics and integration tools that could be used in environmental monitoring.

Tanya presented some really new technologies (really new – perhaps weeks old) in fibre optics capability that have come out of her lab. These new technologies could allow detection of a wide range of biological and chemical properties in the environment, using very cheap sensors that could give immediate readings. The implications for the cost of extent of environmental montioring and in natural resource management are profound.

Living Laboratories is sponsored by ICE WaRM and DWLBC. This particular workshop was also supported by the Water Industry Alliance and Solution City.

Posted by Paul Dalby on 14 February 2008.

Response to Anne on water allocations

litfuse — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:48:18 +0000

Anne, you might be interested in the blog and podcast of Peter Cullen at the Schultz Oration late last year

Should we be able to water our lawns

litfuse — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:44:05 +0000

In response to Leighton and Kerry, I think we should be able to pay more for water if we want to water our lawns. If the price of water was higher, entrepreneurs would find ways of recycling, re-using and finding new water sources to meet the demand. For more discussion on this point, see:

Discussion with Mike Young (and other comments)

Peter Cullen at the Shultz Oration

Bootcamp, climate change and seeing the blogs arrive

litfuse — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:28:11 +0000

For those of you who follow the LitFuse site, you would know that I helped run a “Bootcamp” on web2.0 technologies on Friday. As part of the Bootcamp, the participants are learning how to blog and respond to other blogs.

We have started a conversation about the future of farming in southern Australia given the likely climate shifts as a result of global warming. Mike Seyfang has pointed to these blogs here. (Note that I saw Mike’s blog-post come up in my Google Reader today)

I would like to refer the participants, especially in response to Michael’s blog, to the Lower Murray Landscape Futures project that investigated the impact of global warming on the landscape, economics and social impact in the lower murray region of Australia. You can click on the podcast link to listen to the key scientists talking about the project, or you can download the Executive Summary from the Publications page. If you really want to geek out, try installing Google Earth and looking at the different scenarios overlaid over an image of the region.

To summarise what the project found, climate change may in fact offer better economic opportunities for farmers in this region, assuming Australia adopts a carbon trading scheme which will make biomass fuels and biomass energy economic to produce. However, there may need to be some restoration of native habitat on land that will have a lower economic value and greater ecological value under the different climate change scenarios.

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