New Climate & Soil Phone Apps

SoilMapp for iPad: soil information at your fingertips –

Find out what’s beneath your feet with SoilMapp which taps into the best available soil information from Australia’s national soil databases. You can find out about the likely types of soil near you or you can look anywhere across the country. Discover the soil’s secrets, how it holds water, its clay content, acidity and other attributes related to agricultural productivity and land management.

SoilMapp for iPad enables you to:

• learn about the likely soil types on your property
• view maps, photographs, satellite images, tables and graphs of data about nearby soils
• uncover your soil’s physical and chemical characteristics, including acidity (pH), soil carbon, available water storage, salinity and erodibility
• get soil information to put into the farm computer model APSIM, a model that can help with management decisions on crops and project likely crop yields
• access the app anywhere there is wireless or internet connection to your iPad.

SoilMapp for iPad provides direct access to best national soil data and information from the Australian Soil Resource Information System (ASRIS) and ApSoil, the database behind the agricultural computer model: Agricultural Production Systems SIMulator (APSIM). SoilMapp is designed to make soil information more accessible to help Australian farmers, consultants, planners, natural resource managers, researchers and people interested in soil. CSIRO’s SoilMapp is available from the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/soilmapp/id578173447?mt=8.

New Climate App – An iPhone and iPad application is helping farmers make better farming decisions by answering their questions about the weather. Australian CliMate is a free app that allows farmers to interrogate climate records for the past 60 years to learn about rainfall, temperature, radiation, as well as derived variables such as heat sums, soil water and soil nitrate. CliMate has a number of analyses structured around seven key questions to help farmers determine when crops will germinate or flower, or what inputs may be required.

The questions include how often it will rain or what the probability of temperature being above or below a critical level is, when heat and cold stresses are lowest and how the season’s progress compares to past seasons. How much water and nitrate is stored in the soil, the probability rainfall will be higher or lower than past averages and the current ENSO status are also provided. Graphical views of past monthly and annual rainfall, temperature and radiation are presented so users can examine historic patterns.

The app is suitable for anyone who uses probabilities of weather events in their decision making, from grain growers and graziers to grape growers. The app can also be downloaded for iPod touch. It is available at: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/australian-climate/id582572607?mt=8. A web version will be released in March.