Baseliner Soil: Field Trials 1
Ecological land restoration and conservation currently lack dedicated, in-situ soil monitoring platforms that fit within realistic budgets and resource constraints. Addressing this gap will unlock real-time, actionable data that directly measures soil responses to changing climate conditions and the effectiveness of intervention methods, helping to track outcomes and impact.
Project Backgrounder
A summary of the 2020–2025 field evaluation phase testing low-cost sensors within the Baseliner Soil platform. This completed research project provided lab and field validation for off-the-shelf sensors, inside the Freaklabs hardware and network architecture that’s used for environmental data collection and research.
Identifying Knowledge Gaps
The initiative originated when Bush Heritage Australia (BHA), recognising soil health as fundamental to their overall ecosystem restoration activities, sought deeper insights into soil conditions across their reserves. Traditional soil assessment relies heavily on periodic manual sampling and laboratory analysis. While multi-parameter soil monitoring systems exist, their high cost often makes continuous, high-density field deployment inaccessible for conservation budgets.
Early discussions between BHA and student researchers from the Soils Group (Wong Lab) at Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment centred on whether low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors could be used in the field to understand the effectiveness of BHA’s soil rehydration activities, and how these sensors performed relative to their more expensive counterparts.
Beginning with an offline datalogger, Freaklabs integrated soil moisture, temperature, EC, and pH sensors into a single sensor station. We then expanded the concept and incorporated the sensor station into a wireless sensor network to create an in-situ wireless soil monitoring platform we dubbed Baseliner Soil. The initial configuration of Baseliner Soil combined soil moisture at 2 depths, soil temperature, EC, and pH, using the LoRa wireless protocol for local communications with an 4G LTE cellular backhaul, to transmit data across restoration sites within conservation reserves.
Low-Cost Sensor Evaluation and Selection
The Soils Group at Monash University served as the research lead to establish the accuracy of low-cost sensors against more expensive sensors, and to determine if the low cost sensors could provide data useful enough to measure the effectiveness of BHA’s soil rehydration activities. Research began in 2020 with initial field evaluation of early datalogger prototypes across BHA and Parks Victoria reserves in the Goldfields region in Central Victoria, Australia. In 2022, the Soils Group went deeper with a dedicated PhD project evaluating sensor accuracy across both controlled laboratory conditions and active field environments.
To facilitate testing low-cost sensors against higher-cost options, lab methodologies were used as a benchmark. Freaklabs provided the Soils Group with a proprietary testing platform known as Soily, enabling researchers to verify sensor accuracy, response times, and drift in different soil types under lab conditions. This enabled the Soils Group to perform sensor characterisation and the ability to test different calibration methods to enhance accuracy, whilst gaining a better understanding of the role of soil type in sensor accuracy. Published findings on soil moisture and temperature performance are available here, with EC and pH (paper under review), and soil CO₂ flux (paper in prep) coming soon.
Field Trials
Field trials of the wireless monitoring system began with early pilot deployments at a BHA reserve. These early trials tested wireless network reliability in rugged environments using 4G LTE as Australia began retiring 3G networks. To accelerate rapid prototyping, Freaklabs’ sandbox test site was used for continuous hardware and firmware iteration before rolling out to the live field site.
The field deployments of the low cost sensors were a collaborative effort involving the installation of 27 sensor stations, each measuring soil moisture at 2 depths, soil temperature, EC and pH every 15 minutes across control and treatment sites. Bush Heritage provided site guidance and access for the treatment and control sites, restoration intervention context and deployment assistance. Monash researchers selected the sensors based on lab results, designed the experimental setup, and led sensor placement in the ground. Freaklabs provided the underlying technology stack – engineering, deploying, and maintaining the sensor stations, wireless gateways, network infrastructure, and data platform.
Project Conclusion and Outcomes
The project concluded at the end of 2025. Over 2 years, soil moisture, temperature, EC, and pH data were collected to evaluate whether continuous sensor arrays could detect the impact of landscape-scale rehydration activities, such as ecological thinning, matting and leaky weir installations. A forthcoming research paper from Monash University outlining the field data findings is under review.
The lab testing resulted in a number of key findings:
- Soil Moisture and Temperature: For ecological restoration practices, pairing simple temperature and soil moisture sensors provides conservation organisations with a practical setup for monitoring physical soil dynamics in the field. The digital temperature sensor functions reliably out-of-the-box, requiring no calibration to deliver suitable data. Meanwhile, the soil moisture sensor effectively tracks daily soil drying cycles and water movement over time. In sandy soils, this moisture sensor performs comparably to high-end research probes, though its absolute accuracy decreases in heavy clay environments unless soil (or site) specific continuous calibrations are applied.
- EC and pH: These results will be available once the paper currently under review is published.
Overall, while low-cost soil moisture and temperature sensors cannot fully replace high-cost scientific instruments for absolute analytical precision, applying site-specific calibrations enables them to deliver practical, cost-effective data for tracking real-time environmental trends across restoration plots.
Project Roles & Acknowledgements
Technology Lead: Freaklabs
Provision of lab sensor evaluation platform (“Soily” hardware & software) and wireless soil monitoring network including sensor stations, gateways, API, and dashboard (“Baseliner Soil” hardware & software), deployment and maintenance of the wireless soil monitoring network, field data collection, financial and in-kind support.
Academic Research Lead: Soils Group (Wong Lab), Monash University: Maille Todd (PhD candidate), Assoc. Prof. Vanessa Wong, and Assoc. Prof. Ailie Gallant (supervisors).
Experiment design, sensor lab testing, data analysis and sensor selection, field sensor placement, field data analysis, financial and in-kind support.
Ecological Conservation Lead: Bush Heritage Australia
Ecological expertise, site guidance and access, soil rehydration intervention methods, project and deployment assistance, financial and in-kind support.
The 2027 Field Partner Program: Expanding the R&D Dataset
Whilst these field trials have concluded, Freaklabs has redesigned and expanded the Baseliner Soil platform for its next phase of field research and data collection. The primary objective of our next effort is to build a broader dataset encompassing diverse ecosystems, soil types, and land-use practices to examine how different soils respond to climatic shifts and restoration efforts.
The upgraded system features an expanded sensor suite capturing the soil moisture profile spanning the surface, root zone, buffer, and deeper drainage zones, as well as soil temperature, EC (salinity), and pH. It also integrates a micro-meteorological weather station, capturing rainfall, temperature, and wind speed/direction, alongside an updated web dashboard and data analysis tools.
To help map how diverse soils respond across different environments, we are opening a limited number of co-funded field partner slots for 2027. We are inviting interested climate researchers, soil scientists, ecologists, conservation groups, and land managers incorporating or practising restoration and/or conservation to join this next phase of field testing and dataset development.
If you’d like to register your interest, please fill in the form below. We’ll contact you when the field partnership program opens.
Enquiries
To enquire about a deployment application, please contact us using the form below.