Innovation Guide 2023 - 7

Powering Sydney, Australia's green spaces
By Peter Knight
A
s Australia heats up and El Niño approaches, it is a
good time to consider the role of urban green spaces.
Parks provide quiet retreats for people in busy cities,
supporting community members' health and wellness,
but they also support conservation, resilience and climate-readiness.
New technology is enabling park managers to effectively use parks
as active assets to help control local microclimates and mitigate the
urban heat island effect.
Smart Irrigation
In Sydney, the capital of the state
of New South Wales (NSW),
a collaboration between local
government, academic institutions
and industry is proving
this concept. Sydney's Olympic
Park, a 42-hectare
(104-acre)
site in the metropolis' Central
River District, is the location of
the Smart Irrigation Management
for Parks and Cool Towns
(SIMPaCT), which integrates a
network of environmental sensors
with weather station data
and machine learning. Its goal is
not only to conserve water and
other resources, but also to optimize
the park cooling island effect
through managed irrigation
on the surrounding urban area.
Sebastian Pfautsch, Ph.D., associate
professor of urban studies
at Western Sydney University,
is the project lead. He notes that
the park cooling island effect on
the surrounding urban residential
area varies throughout the day
due to the lower thermal mass
of the park area versus the higher
mass of surrounding concrete
and asphalt. In the night, this
difference can be as much as 7.5
degrees Celsius, and smart irrigation
is used to reach at least
3 degrees Celsius during warm
summer days.
SIMPaCT has embedded
more than 50 above-ground
sensors, as well as 200 belowground
sensors,
in
Olympic
Park, which are connected using
a long-range wide area network
(LoRaWAN). In addition
to this network, the project also
uses 13 weather stations that
record additional important environmental
information, like
PARK S ANDRECRE AT ION . OR G | 2 0 2 3 INNO V AT ION GUIDE | Parks & Recreation
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Innovation Guide 2023

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