Our #1622app at D61+Live

Last week I got to experience my first D61+Live conference in Brisbane, where we presented our first prototype of our new #1622app, which provides information on water quality and crop health in the Great Barrier Reef region. Our app is designed to help sugarcane farmers reduce nitrogen losses to the Great Barrier Reef while not affecting their profits.

D61+Live was an incredible and exciting event attended by over 1,500 people and gave us an opportunity to interact with potential users of our product. The main interest came from representatives of the canegrowers community and the Queensland Government, who appreciated the near-real time aspect of our platform. Indeed, our platform provides information on water quality with a mere 15 minute delay, while crop health information is currently provided at 5-day intervals. We also received a lot of inquiries from private sector representatives interested in using our technology in other agricultural sectors, such as corn and almond farming. For example, an engineering company was interested in facilitating the adoption of our decision support tool among canegrowers in the Burdekin area. Who knows where such collaboration might lead?

Finally, D61+live was a great opportunity to reinforce our ongoing collaborations with Emesent (provider of the drone-based laser scanning platform), TerriaJS (provider of an open source mapping platform for custom designed maps) and CSIRO’s Senaps team (provider of the scalable cloud based data storage and programming interface for sensor data streaming) for Digiscape. Looking back at my D61+live experience, I can say that our #1622 app was warmly received, and I am happy to be involved in this ever-growing project.

More about our project is here and you can follow developments on Twitter using #1622app.

By Dr Yuri Shendryk, Digiscape Postdoctoral Fellow