Innovation
Innovation is the heart of Verterra’s business model of bringing leading edge technologies, services and practices to benefit our clients.
Innovation at Verterra spans the value chain from the processes underpinning our business, through our relentless search for new technologies, products and services that support delivery of nature-based solutions that can assist our clients to turn risk into value.
Innovative outcomes achieved by Verterra and its staff include:
- Development of an integrated, amended water approach to beneficial use of coal seam gas water via irrigation of crops and trees, leading to the first beneficial use licence for large scale irrigated use of coal seam gas water in Queensland.
- Breeding and development of new salt-tolerant hybrid-tree varieties.
- Use of commercial forestry for management and reclamation of saline land.
- Design and development of a low pressure herbicide application system to avoid spray drift in high wind conditions.
- Development of a system for rehabilitation of semi-evergreen vine thicket (SEVT) communities to rehabilitate mine sites.
- Contribution to development of a modelling tool (CatchMODS), linked to the daily water balance and erosion model, HowLeaky, to investigate sources and sinks of pollution, sediment and associated water quality in catchments.
- Species trials for identification of species performance by location, and environmental interactions.
- Development of novel approaches combining timber production, grazing, biodiversity and carbon sequestration to maximise economic, environmental and community returns from integrated land-use.
- Design of modified approaches to irrigation system architectures accounting for plant-soil-water interactions using poor quality waste waters.
- Development of approaches to maximise early water use from crop-type mixtures in waste-water irrigation projects.
- Commercial implementation of Threshold Electrolyte Conductivity (TEC) analysis for soil permeability changes in response to irrigation waters.
Our staff a widely published across a range of disciplines. For full list of staff publications, see our Technical Papers page.
Verterra has established formal and informal relationships with scientists at leading research organisations around Australia including:
- University of Southern Queensland, National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture
- University of Queensland, Agriculture & Food Science, Soil and Environmental Science
- University of the Sunshine Coast, School of Science & Education
- Southern Cross University, Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics
- Southern Cross University, School of Environmental Science and Management
- Griffith University, Environmental Futures Centre
- University of Western Australia, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, School of Plant Biology
- University of Adelaide
- University of Canberra
- Horticulture, Forest and Research Sciences (Qld).
Verterra staff have worked productively with researchers from these organisations, including in the capacity of PhD Supervision and successful grants (including ARC Linkage and Rural Industries Research and Development Fund (RIRDC)). We maintain an ongoing dialogue with researchers across these institutions.
Our unique blend of research linkages with consultancy and operational delivery services provides the capacity to bring high quality research through to practical, real world application.