Completed research projects

Mobilising collections through genomics

Natural history collections are vast biodiversity reference libraries, used for hundreds of years to help identify, understand and manage biodiversity.

Rapid assessment of environmental stress for major Australian plant groups

Rapid assessment of environmental stress will provide information that is important for managing and conserving Australian plants in rapidly changing environments.

Understanding stress in Australia’s animals and plants

Environmental changes cause stress to our biodiversity, increasing the chances of disease outbreaks, extinctions, waves of invasive species and other environmental problems that can occur in stressed ecosystems.

Mapping pollinator networks

Biodiversity and food security both depend on pollination of native plants and crops. But pollinators are in decline due to threats such as land clearing, habitat fragmentation, pesticides and climate change.

Environmental DNA for mapping biodiversity, detecting pests and characterising food-webs

Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis is an emerging molecular technique for DNA-based identification of organisms.

Microbes and healthy waterways

We are investigating the relationship between microbial diversity and ecosystem health in marine environments.

Bioinformatics for Environomics

Our bioinformatics team is developing ways to solve the unique data analysis challenges created by high throughput sequencing of environmental samples and biological collections.

Online species maps from environmental DNA

The Environomics Future Science Platform has teamed with the Atlas of Living Australia to build a new online system to make cutting-edge biological records accessible.

Electric microbes: new methods of cultivating subsurface life

This project will verify whether subsurface microbes can be cultivated in the lab by providing electrons directly as the energy source opening up new possibilities to utilise subsurface microbial life.

Using microbes to estimate the health of estuaries

In this project we are using metagenomic sequencing combined with experiments in the laboratory and in the field to unlock the relationships between microbial identity (i.e., who is there) and the ecosystem functions they perform (i.e., what are they doing).

Biodiversity informatics for conservation and biosecurity

We are developing tools that will allow users to combine and analyse standard data types in biodiversity informatics, in this case large-scale information about the evolutionary history of species, traits for individuals or species, and ecological data.