Baselining and enabling a data-rich city

Sydney Science Park (SSP) aspires to deliver a vibrant, connected, resilient, and sustainable city for the community in Western Sydney. The Urban Living Lab is fostering data gathering and learning at the site, seeking to improve cross-sector knowledge that will lead to better decisions and more integrated outcomes in health and liveability, sustainability, and resilience of the community and the environment. By establishing baseline measurements, we can continuously monitor factors that contribute to community health and well-being, sustainable use of resources and ecological factors across the timeframe of the development.

How are we approaching this?

Since June 2018, some baselining activities to date have included:

• the installation of environmental sensors that provide information on the local microclimate, air quality, rainfall, soil moisture, wind direction and noise;
• the installation of water quality, flow and depth sensors that provide a greater understanding of stormwater flows, which will guide integrated water cycle planning and management;
• mapping of solar radiation levels is also being undertaken to inform planning for urban heat and renewable energy generation through solar photovoltaics;
• a temperature baselining campaign was conducted during the summer of 2023-24. Read more here.
• undertaking regular quality control and validation of collected data onsite against nearby reference environmental monitoring sites;

What’s next?

We will continue to monitor environmental parameters and stormwater data throughout the time of development.

A framework for baselining and monitoring the ecological health of waterways is currently under development.

Keep an eye out for the upcoming publication of results on our website.

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