Industrial - Bachelor

BackTrack

BackTrack is a compact, intelligent environmental monitoring system that empowers citizen scientists and transforms every hike into an expedition of ecological discovery. Clipped to a backpack, it captures highresolution imagery of vegetation, ambient soundscapes, and GPS data to map forest structure and generate vital insights for rangers and researchers to assess bushfire risk and guide sustainable land management.

Ryan Chappell

Australia’s Rich and Turbulent Fire History

Fire maintains symbiotic relationships between rich varieties of native fire-adapted flora, providing nourishment, stimulating flowering, and enabling regermination. Australia’s Indigenous communities have facilitated these symbiotic relationships for tens of thousands of years by initiating strategic burns across Country. Over recent years, Australia’s land management and fire regimes have varied dramatically, affecting fire frequency and intensity, with devastating immediate and long-term impacts.

Vegetation monitoring is a critical exercise for understanding and assessing vegetation growth and informing of appropriate land management practices.

monitoring technologies are expensive, constrained by the terrain, and can’t see below the forest canopy.

National Parks and Vegetation Monitoring

National parks provide the largest refuges to native ecosystems in Australia. However, current vegetation monitoring practices are rudimentary and laborious. Moisture content is typically measured by collecting leaf litter in a tin can and baking it in an oven, and aboveground biomass is measured using a yardstick.

Considering the sheer scale of our natural forests in Australia, conducting appropriate vegetation surveys becomes a logistical nightmare, for which national parks are already underfunded and ill-equipped to perform. Modern technologies, including satellite imaging and drones are employed in some cases, though these technologies are constrained by temporal and spatial resolution, but also crucially cost and an ability to penetrate beneath dense canopies.

This leads to an opportunity for a ground-based, mobile monitoring solution, with the capability to gather fine scale structural data below the canopy level.

Introducing backtrack

BackTrack was created in response to Australia’s shifting fire regimes and the growing need for informed, data-driven land management. Existing technologies, such as drones and satellites, are valuable but costly, require specialist operation, and often fail to penetrate dense forest canopies where critical structural data resides. BackTrack addresses this gap through a cost-effective, ground-based solution that encourages citizen scientists to explore native ecosystems and contribute to biodiversity conservation.

BackTrack can simply be clipped to a backpack and will collect data from the surrounding forest as you explore. The onboard GPS will determine if you have entered an of the forest where data needs to be collected. Images of the surrounding vegetation will be collected and used to generate point clouds of ground-level biomass. This data is then used to inform land managers of the state of vegetation across the park, enabling more effective and data-driven management strategies for pre- and post-bushfire stages.

The more you explore, the more you help conserve.

From bushland to data—your walk matters.

Using photogrammetry, BackTrack captures images at GPS-defined intervals as users move through the landscape. These overlapping images are later triangulated to reconstruct detailed 3D models of vegetation, using the same principles that underpin modern drone-based surveying. When not in use, BackTrack can be attached to a tree to intermittently document vegetation growth over time — extending its role from exploration tool to long-term ecological observer.

BackTrack has:
– an IP56 enclosure for withstanding rain and dust;
– a 12MP camera module for high quality RGB images;
– injection moulded housing for cost-effective manufacturing;
– a LiFePO4 battery for good performance with no fire risk;
– a case designed for application flexibility and enhanced water resistance.

Ryan Chappell

Ryan is an Industrial Design and Accounting student at QUT. He has numerous years of professional experience in design, engineering and accountancy in consultancies, multi-national conglomerates and in academic research. Ryan is dedicated to sustainable and socially responsible design, and excited about the role emerging technologies can play in shaping our future.