CSIRO geochemical sampling

Two CSIRO geoscientists at a sampling site in saltbush country under a wide blue sky. One kneels in high-visibility clothing bagging a soil sample, the other stands recording it on a tablet, and the survey helicopter is landed on the red earth behind them. — Sample site CSCOOM-S-0131, Coompana, South Australia, 7 November 2017, photographed from within FAIMS Mobile on the field tablet.

A CSIRO field team at a sampling site on pale, stony ground dotted with low grey shrubs, under a clear blue sky with woodland behind. Two people in hats stand looking at handheld devices, a third kneels to write on a sample bag beside a red backpack, and two more walk in from the left. — A CSIRO field team at a sampling site.

Photographs: Nathan Reid, CSIRO.

Domain: geoscience · Deployment: Fieldmark-hosted · Scale: small field teams on remote campaigns of several weeks · Year: 2014 to present, on Fieldmark since 2024

This work began on FAIMS Mobile, the platform Fieldmark® was rebuilt from, and moved to Fieldmark in 2024. Evidence from the earlier period is dated below, and its attribution names the software of the day.

Remote sampling, on a helicopter’s schedule

Regional geochemical surveys in the Australian interior run on short windows and long sample lists. The Coompana campaign of November 2017, run by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO with the Geological Survey of South Australia, sampled a grid at four-kilometre intervals by helicopter across twelve days in the field.

Every sample taken that way needs a persistent identifier, a position, and a set of observations recorded the same way by teams working apart from each other. Done on paper, that work is done twice: once at the sample point, and again in the evening as data entry.

What was built

The team customised the software for its own sampling work. That customisation is described in the project’s own peer-reviewed account:

[CSIRO] customised FAIMS Mobile for the rapid and accurate collection of environmental samples. This customisation allocated IGSNs to samples during fieldwork when they were collected.

Ross, Ballsun-Stanton, Cassidy, Crook, Klump, and Sobotkova, Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 2022. The paper is written by the software team with Jens Klump of CSIRO, so it is the project’s own account.

The work is documented on CSIRO’s side too. The agency’s 2018 report on the hydrogeochemistry of the Capricorn Orogen carries a section of its own, “FAIMS Sampling Application Development” (pp. 33–36). It records that the field sampling application was generated with integration for the International Geo Sample Number (IGSN).

What CSIRO reported

The Coompana report, published with the Geological Survey of South Australia in 2018, records what followed the trials: CSIRO’s soil, regolith, biogeochemical, and hydrogeochemical sampling moved to the application, and the evening and end- of-trip data entry that paper recording had required disappeared. That account describes the FAIMS Android application, the generation of the software that preceded Fieldmark. The report, with its adoption statement quoted in full, is on publications.

Where the work is now

CSIRO’s current work with Fieldmark includes regional baseline geochemical surveys in Victoria and hydrogeochemistry sampling around Smithton, Tasmania. CSIRO is also integrating Fieldmark with Specify (GeoSpecify), the cataloguing system for the management of geological sample storage. Earlier work used Fieldmark for groundwater sampling in the Great Sandy Desert, and for regolith mapping, soil, lithological, and vegetation sampling in the Australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub’s project on clay-hosted rare earth element deposits.

The rare earth element work sits in the Australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub.

CSIRO now cites Fieldmark by name. Its 2026 standard metadata template for water samples records that the template’s water-sample fields are “derived from the field definitions used in the CSIRO Fieldmark application”, and its project description places that work inside CSIRO’s end-to-end sample tracking project.