QUENDA... SO SIMPLE 
AND YET SO SMART

Soil pitting is the act of creating small holes in the soil crust, into which nutrients, plant litter, seeds and water collect to provide a favourable environment for the germination and growth of seedlings. This process, called bioturbation, restarts the ecological cycle that was historically performed by millions of native Australian marsupials. These marsupials have been severely, if not entirely, lost from the landscape, due to overstocking leading to loss of cover and subsequent predation by cats and foxes. 

Several other man-made techniques currently exist, with many achieving great results, but are too costly to implement on a broad scale. Examples are Zai pits and mechanical rangeland pitting. Zai pitting is a similar but manual technique that has effectively been used in the Sahel of Africa and Kenya to reduce desertification and helped bring productivity to farms (Danjuma et al., 2015). Zai pitting is impractical in Australia as it's a manual process that would be too expensive to perform in remote degraded rangelands. Mechanical rangeland pitting is a Western agricultural technique that has been used for rangeland rehabilitation in the Middle East, Western and South Australia and the USA. The difference is that instead of digging the holes individually and autonomously, furrows are created by towing an implement over the soil behind a tractor (Rangelands NRM, Western Australia. n.d.). This is impractical in remote rangelands due to capital equipment requirements, high operating expenses, and the high likelihood of inadvertent environmental damage due to the wide footprint, poor manoeuvrability and heavy wheel loads of the equipment used.

Quenda is an autonomous solar-powered soil pitting rover. Each Quenda, whilst autonomous, is remotely monitored, programmed and tele-remote controlled via Telstra 3/4G, NBN Skymesh or Starlink satellite connection. It can also perform additional functions by serving as a mobile base station for other monitoring or active tasks such as soil carbon testing, ground penetrating radar scanning, plant and animal species monitoring, and assisting vermin and weed extermination. This project has the potential to unlock a large amount of useful research data.

Several papers have documented the role of native burrowing animals in the process of bioturbation. The Quenda emulates native animal bioturbation by drilling shallow angled holes or soil pits on a grid pattern. These pits capture nutrients, plant litter, seeds and rainfall runoff creating ideal conditions for seed germination and establishment, increasing biodiversity and commencing a return to the original ecological cycle (Palmer et al., 2020) (Fleming et al., 2014). CO2 is then naturally sequestered through accelerated plant growth above and below ground.