Congratulations to two Macquarie University teams which were successful in the latest Australian Research Council Linkage Project grants.

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Close to $550,000 has been awarded to Dr Rachael Gallagher (pictured), Dr Sasha Tetu and Professor Ian Wright, for a research project with AirSeed Technologies, the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust to restore native vegetation in degraded land – including bushfire affected areas – by using cutting-edge drone technology for precision-based seeding.

“More than 52 million hectares of Australia is now considered degraded land and we urgently need scalable solutions which will allow us to restore diverse native vegetation,” Rachael explains.

“Drones offer us a combination of precision and scalability, where we can ‘plant’ pre-formed seedpods which contain a seed, nutrients and microbial inoculants. This technology is used widely for forestry, but our project is all about creating an evidence base for applying it to native Australian plants and finding those areas in the landscape where it may be most viable.”

Lead Chief Investigator Professor Iain Collings, along with Professor Stephen Hanly and Dr Hazer Inaltekin, has also received $400,000 for a research project which will develop novel signal processing and communications approaches to deliver high quality data services to vast numbers of remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

“We’re very excited about this new project at the nexus of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Satellite Technologies,” Iain says.

“Both areas offer great potential for Australia and globally, particularly in areas of agriculture, mining, environmental monitoring, and land and ocean transport industries. We are especially excited to be working with our industrial partner Myriota, in this rapidly expanding area.”