AgReFed Platform

The Challenge

Agricultural research data in Australia is currently difficult to find and share. Publicly available datasets, such as remote sensed vegetation data, and compute facilities are also not easily accessible by all researchers.

The Response

The AgReFed Platform project will improve the discoverability of trusted, reusable and analysis-ready agricultural research data across Australia, supporting collaboration and novel insights in research, development and policy.

It will do this through analysis of key use cases to establish the needs of the community, and the subsequent expansion and enhancement of the current AgReFed Platform.

The project involves the following elements:

Who Will Benefit

Researchers across disciplines who use a number of agricultural online services, local and federal government, research organisations and farmers’ organisations will benefit from the project’s core features:

• infrastructure fit for purpose – building Australian agriculture data infrastructure around use cases from the community and driven by FAIR data standards
• simple access – making it easier for those without technical expertise to search, discover, access, integrate, analyse and package data, models, and data products in a cloud compute environment
• cross-domain integration of agricultural information – enabling, for example, users to display data from natural capital and economic activity, for policy and decision making.

The Partners

Our partners are:

• Federation University
• University of Sydney
• University of Southern Queensland
• QCIF

Target Outcomes

AgReFed enables researchers to search and discover trusted, reusable agriculture-related datasets, workflows and models. This will facilitate data reuse and cross-discipline collaborations for novel research insights and practical applications in policy, reporting and on-ground decision making.