Adelaide's Growing Data Foundation brings smart technology to monitoring nests of native animals/birds
A founder of Growing Data Foundation, Adelaide University Phd student Samantha Bywaters with a squirrel glider and one of the smart monitored nest boxes.
Image courtesy Growing Data Foundation
An Adelaide not-for-profit company, Growing Data Foundation, has set up a network of nest boxes, able to transmit low bandwidth data, to monitor their use by native animals and birds. The boxes’ smart technology replaces the previous ineffective manual checking of nests for things such as birds’ movements, temperature and humanity.
Growing Data Foundation, founded in 2014, has started with four smart nest boxes in the Adelaide metropolitan area. It hoped data from those would show the state government, councils and citizen scientists how a network of hundreds of boxes across South Australia would benefit nature conservation.
The network could talk to the internet without using 3G or wi fi. Senors n the boxes, with very low battery use, are connected to a LoRaWAN (low-range wide-area network) via Internet of Things gateways. These gateways in South Australia grew from eight to 70 in three years and Growing Data Foundation found it could cover the whole Gulf St Vincent area using LoRaWAN devices the size of a matchbox, covering ranges 90-100km.
A grant from the Adelaide Mount Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management board back the smart nest boxes project that would also developed with Adelaide company fauNature.
Growing Data Foundation supports sustainable open solutions for community improvement and social good, with biodiversity a prime cause. The foundation works with groups such as The Things Network Adelaide, Adelaide Open Data and IoT Meetup group.
It is also part of Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN), a rapidly growing network of more 900 global innovators and change makers across national governments, non-governmental organisations, and international and private sector organisations to achieve food security by 2030.
