ICT to address issues of water management

National ICT Australia (NICTA) has announced the first of its Priority Challenge Strategic Projects, the Water Information Network (WIN) Project. According to NICTA, this project is aimed at providing the information infrastructure to support smart use of the water resource on the scale of an entire water catchment.

"NICTA is taking a holistic approach to the issue of water management under the umbrella of the WIN Project. We have developed sub-projects to tackle particular areas of water management, including irrigation, natural river systems and urban water," said Professor Iven Mareels, project leader for Water Information Networks (WIN) at NICTA.

NICTA announced the first sub-project is to develop a wireless communication technology infrastructure for on-farm water management. This new ICT infrastructure, consisting of a network of sensors and actuators that communicates over a wireless network, combined with sophisticated management software, will be able to provide irrigation water when and where it is needed on the farm so as to achieve maximum economic return.