A decade-long landscape research study of how Australian bushland might cope with higher levels of carbon dioxide and changed rainfall patterns is about to get under way, building on the results of preliminary studies published last year and this year.
The study is being conducted by the University of Western Sydney’s Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at the supersite known as EucFACE. The university is collaborating with TERN’s Australian Supersite Network. The study will gauge how eucalypt forest responds in an atmosphere that contains the amount of carbon dioxide that would result if no significant action is taken to reduce carbon emissions over the next few decades.
The study was reported recently in The Guardian, and features a video that gives insights into the complex infrastructure that has been set up to conduct the study. It has also been featured in TERN’s Facebook feed.
Elsewhere in the ether, the chair of the TERN advisory board, Professor Andrew Campbell, has been waving the TERN flag at meetings in the United States. Andrew is also the Director of the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University, and noted in one of his blogs about his visit the potential for Australia and the US to improve scientific collaboration, because the nations had complementary scientific expertise and geography.
Andrew suggested that TERN has no direct equivalent in the US, and commented that Australia does comparatively well in collaborative research, ‘especially when it comes to involving a wide range of stakeholders in working through big issues with a mix of “bottom up” and “top down” processes’.
Published in TERN e-Newsletter May 2012
