CHANGING THE WORLD STARTS HERE

VISION

Ecological Engineering

To be the global leader in rehabilitating disturbed and degraded rangeland ecosystems by simply mimicking the ecological engineering once done by Australia’s now largely extinct marsupials, and then letting nature do the rest.

THE QUENDA

The Quenda is a sub species of the Southern Brown Bandicoot, the name derived from the Noongar Boodjar word kwinda.

They, like hundreds of other Australian marsupials, spend time burrowing small holes in the soil looking for food. One Quenda digs around 4 tonnes of dirt a year. In the process of digging pits the Quenda actually engineer the ecosystem. It turns out that the pits perform a really important ecological function because they act to collect nutrients, water, plant litter and seeds providing the perfect conditions for germination.

MISSION

By kickstarting the rehabilitation of degraded rangelands we will also sequester CO2 both in the soil and in the biomass on a scale that dwarfs any current sequestration methodology and will do on the basis of real verifiable numbers, not guesses from a computer model.

In the process we will also restore biodiversity and ecological function as well as provide real time data on invasive flora and fauna to assist in their control.

Ultimately the automation of the simplest ecological process has the potential to have the most profound and positive effect on mitigating the effects of climate change, creating a world in which our kids and their kids can once again thrive.

QUENDA QUEST

Quenda is a low-cost solar powered, autonomous “Mars style” rover that simply emulates a quenda (bandicoot) by drilling shallow, angled holes into the ground at a rate of 20,000 holes per hectare per day.

These pits create the ideal conditions to kick start the process of ecological succession and ultimately the regeneration of ecosystems and biodiversity. Human activity has caused vast degradation and nature can’t, by itself, heal the wounds. The problem is too big to solve without automation.

To solve the problem we will use nature's very own solution, rolled out with a fleet of low-cost automated Quendas.

If we give nature the start, it can do the rest. It has already been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.

The importance of biodiversity

Before European colonisation, the Australian outback was a savannah.

Nearly 50% of our forest cover has been cleared in the last two centuries, making Australia one of the worst developed countries for deforestation and land clearing. And we have the worst mammal extinction rate of any country.