Baseliner: Wireless Soil Monitoring to Support Biodiversity and Land Restoration

Healthy soils are the foundation of biodiversity, ecosystem stability, and climate resilience, yet monitoring soil remains fragmented, labor-intensive, and costly, particularly across remote, degraded, or ecologically sensitive landscapes. Understanding soil dynamics is critical for guiding land management and conservation practices, yet conventional soil monitoring methods often fail to capture the temporal and spatial variability needed to inform effective interventions. To address this gap, we introduce Baseliner, a wireless soil monitoring network developed over the course of five years of field deployment, specifically designed to monitor and establish baseline soil health data in the context of land conservation and ecological restoration.

The system provides continuous, high-resolution measurements of key soil parameters, including moisture dynamics, temperature, conductivity, pH, and CO₂ flux. Baseliner integrates low-power, long-range wireless communication technologies (LoRa, 4G cellular, and satellite) with solar-powered, low-maintenance deployment and redundant data backup, ensuring reliable, long-term monitoring even in remote and challenging environments. This robust design allows for near-real-time observation of both rapid and gradual soil processes, capturing critical indicators such as infiltration rates, microbial activity, and nutrient dynamics.

Developed in close collaboration with ecological restoration practitioners and soil scientists, Baseliner reflects interdisciplinary learnings from  years of integrating technology with soil ecology. By providing spatially distributed, temporally continuous data, the network supports adaptive management interventions including soil rehydration and hydrology management, while creating a historical baseline to evaluate long-term soil recovery.

We will present a case study illustrating how combining soil restoration practices with continuous monitoring enables practitioners to assess the effectiveness and ecological impact of management actions, improving decision-making, informing policy, and enhancing the long-term stewardship of soil biodiversity. Along the way, we will also present learnings from both successes and failures of the techniques we tried. By bridging the gap between field-based ecological practice and technological innovation, Baseliner provides a scalable, data-driven approach to advancing soil health monitoring and conservation outcomes.