Australia’s inland waterways, reservoirs and coastal waters provide significant benefits to the ecosystem, local economy, public health, and food security (Boyd, 2020). Currently, securing water resources and their quality has been regarded as a critical consideration due to its increasing demand with socioeconomic and population growth, shrinking freshwater resources, and aquatic ecosystem degradation (SmartSat, 2021). In this sense, substantial improvements have been achieved to safeguard water resources through various management strategies, plans and regulatory arrangements. For instance, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) highlights the importance of water quality and access to clean, safe, and secure water supplies are fundamental for attaining sustainable development by ensuring availability and sustainable management of water at the regional and global level (GEO – Group on Earth Observations, 2018). However, the quality of water resources has been impaired to some degree due to various natural and anthropogenic disturbances such as excessive use of pesticides, harmful chemical substances, soil erosion, organic wastes, and heavy metals from the industry (Briffa, Sinagra, & Blundell, 2020; Issaka & Ashraf, 2017). Therefore, there is an urgent need to continuously monitor the quality of Australian inland and coastal waters by harnessing innovative approaches.

In the last few decades, “Digital Earth” has been widely used as a strategic platform to support national and international cooperation towards reaching sustainable development goals (SDGs). Along with being a global strategic contributor to sustainable development, the Digital Earth is being regarded as a vital approach for addressing the environmental, social, economic and cultural challenges that affect human lives, their nations and the planet Earth, allowing humankind to visualise the Earth, to access information about it and to understand above issues (Dhu et al., 2017; Mazlan, Samsudin, & Yin Chai, 2014). Guo, Goodchild, and Annoni (2020) described the Digital Earth as the combination of massive, multi-resolution, multi-temporal, and multi-typed Earth Observation (EO) and appropriate smart analytical algorithms. The Earth Observation (EO), one of the integral parts of Digital Earth, includes next-generation remote sensing satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and has become a significant part of environmental sustainability to tackle current and emerging challenges, including climate change, natural resource depletion, water insecurity, and environmental degradation (Alvarez-Vanhard, Corpetti, & Houet, 2021). In this respect, Digital Earth Australia (DEA) was established to provide insights into Australia’s evolving land, coast, and water issues by utilizing EO data and other geospatial data (Dhu et al., 2017).

With the technological advances in computational power and internet capabilities, unprecedented opportunities have emerged. For example, cutting-edge sensor technology evolved the way of monitoring environmental, social, and economic challenges. One of the highly developed sensor technologies is the Internet of Things (IoT), which enables interconnecting Things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies at various scales (Guo et al., 2020). In other words, it is a network of infrastructure in which objects equipped with computing capabilities can communicate directly with each other and collect and transmit data to central servers (ITU, 2012; Tzounis et al., 2017). The IoT contains real-time in situ water quality data with high temporal and spatial resolution, capturing dynamic flow characteristics, pollution events, and water quality extremes (Chowdury et al., 2019). Furthermore, the low cost and ease of deploying IoT sensors throughout the area of interest significantly reduce data collection barriers while increasing data transparency.

Integrating Digital Earth and derived products with ground-based, high accuracy & frequency IoT sensor networks in the domain of water quality monitoring is a promising option to determine quality parameters, understand its variability and inform evaluations of water quality prediction. Furthermore, this collaboration can provide an integrative and quantitative water source management necessary for evidence-based decision-making (Loucks & van Beek, 2017). In this sense, SmartSat CRC is implementing a pilot project named “Satcom IoT-enabled automatic groundwater collection and aggregation pilot (SIG WATER)”, which is dedicated to checking the technical feasibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of deploying IoT sensors as an end-to-end solution for groundwater bores. Furthermore, another project titled “Next-generation testbed design for Earth observation” aims to enhance the right level of “trust” for EO data and derived products by calibration and validation. In the context of our research, we would like to integrate a state-of-the-art ground-based IoT network with quality-assured, uncertainty quantified EO data for water quality monitoring along the Australian west coastline through the abundance of partnerships with organisations and industry cooperation.