Evidence-based policy and management are important to help in the complex challenge of influencing decisions about the environment, which is often changing. Increasingly, there is broad understanding that people are integrally part of the environment, directly or indirectly influencing it in many different ways.
Marine scientists need to be generalists to meet modern challenges of a rapidly changing marine ecosystem. We address a wide range of issues, such as the urbanising coasts of the world, to the changing distributions of species in response to climate change.
Increasingly, we are investigating changes over large parts of the world in different ecosystems. Understanding how and why large scale changes are occurring across the landscape is critical for management of environments and informing relevant policy.
The Centre for Ecosystem Science has a strong background and focus on investigating the ecology of wetlands and rivers. We are particularly interested in the “boom” and “bust” ecology of inland river systems, focusing a considerable amount of our work in the Murray-Darling Basin and its more important wetlands.
We're interested in a wide range of processes and organisms in terrestrial ecosystems. In particular, we investigate how ecosystems work and the interactions between the drivers of ecosystem productivity (soils, for example) and different organisms from the microscopic to top predators.
Wild Deserts is an exciting project with a vision to understand, restore and promote desert ecosystems through ecosystem manipulations, reintroductions and collaborative partnerships.