Charles Sturt University Wagga will collaborate with Geoscience Australia in Digital Earth Australia program

Professor Michael Friend, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the university, said that the collaboration with Geoscience's Digital Earth Australia program would be organised through the AgriPark hub.

"Digital Earth Australia has an enormous data set of over 30 years of satellite images, so we can look at time changes in terms of agricultural and environmental landscapes, and undertake analysis of that," Professor Friend said.

"[We can] see what sorts of changes might have occurred and how that might inform management decisions."

The university recently announced that it would commit $14 million to expand the AgriPark at the Wagga campus.

It also comes off the back of the $8 million federal funding to set up Wagga campus as a hub for drought resilience research.

Professor Friend said the signed memorandum of understanding with Geoscience would further enhance the agricultural offerings to staff and students offered out of the hub.

"What that means for the Wagga campus is that our staff and our students can access the enormous data set that Digital Earth Australia has to enhance their learning opportunities," he said.

"It allows us to analyse those images and determine trends that might impact our future. So it enables us to mine those images to determine what trends might have occurred and what implications that has for future management of our agricultural and environmental landscapes."

Trent Kershaw, director of program delivery at Digital Earth Australia said the collaboration was aimed at getting "satellite data into the toolkits of the next generation of regional Australia".

But the collaboration does not represent the first time the two organisations have worked together.

"This is a formalisation of a longer-term relationship that we've had," Mr Kershaw said.

"We met a few years ago and have been playing around with ideas and looking at ways to work together, and we're formalising that relationship."

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