Peter Fitch

WetUp: a software tool to display approximate wetting patterns from drippers

Knowledge of the wetted perimeter of soil arising from infiltration of water from trickle irrigation drippers is important in the design and management of efficient systems. A user-friendly software tool, WetUp, has been developed to help highlight the impact of soils on water distribution in trickle-irrigated systems. WetUp determines the approximate radial and vertical wetting distances from an emitter in homogeneous soils calculated using analytical methods, and then uses an elliptical plotting function to approximate the expected wetted perimeter. In this paper we describe WetUp and use examples to demonstrate how it can be applied. We also compare the wetted perimeter predicted using WetUp with that predicted by other methods. Results show that the wetting pattern is well described by the ellipsoidal approximation for slowly permeable soils, but that it tends to underestimate the radial wetting in highly permeable soils, particularly as the volume of applied water increases. The error is, however, small in most cases, and of minimal concern when applying WetUp to illustrate the important role that soil hydraulic properties play in determining wetting patterns.

Linking Australian Government Data for Sustainability Science - A Case Study

Sustainability science has been viewed as a new discipline which focuses on the complex interactions between nature and society. It demands intensive integration of data from different sources within different domains. Governments collect and generate huge amounts of scientific data and thus are in a unique position to support sustainability research. However, there are many challenges in discovering and re-using government data. In this chapter, first, we survey the sustainability related datasets published by the Australian government. We believe this is the critical first step to identifying the opportunities and issues and advancing the Australian Government 2.0 agenda. Second, we investigate the role of Linked Data in integrating a selection of Australian government datasets to generate sustainability science hypotheses and support the data analysis.We discuss the challenges based on our survey experience and present some recommendations for data publishing and analysis.

Integrated Groundwater Data Management

The goal of a data manager is to ensure that data is safely stored, adequately described, discoverable and easily accessible. However, to keep pace with the evolution of groundwater studies in the last decade, the associated data and data management requirements have changed significantly. In particular, there is a growing recognition that management questions cannot be adequately answered by single discipline studies. This has led a push towards the paradigm of integrated modeling, where diverse parts of the hydrological cycle and its human connections are included. This chapter describes groundwater data management practices, and reviews the current state of the art with enterprise groundwater database management systems. It also includes discussion on commonly used data management models, detailing typical data management lifecycles. We discuss the growing use of web services and open standards such as GWML and WaterML2.0 to exchange groundwater information and knowledge, and the need for national data networks. We also discuss cross-jurisdictional interoperability issues, based on our experience sharing groundwater data across the US/Canadian border. Lastly, we present some future trends relating to groundwater data management.