Biodiversity

The Environment Institute seeks to understand how we can protect and enhance biodiversity despite pressure from human activity and changing climate.

Our research investigates whole ecosystems and assessing human pressures on them by drawing on expertise in data processing and modelling, ecological and evolutionary processes and knowledge of conversation science.

The Environment Institute's research strengths and themes in biodiversity include:

• Discovering and understanding animals plants and organisms - both the individual species and the whole ecosystem.
• Evolutionary history and relationships over deep time and exploring genetic information through biogeography and barcoding.
• Biosecurity, managing pests and disease risks to Australia, food and the marine environment as well as native species and land environments.
• Data processing, analysis and modelling - how bioinformatics supports an understanding of species and ecosystems and change over time.
• Understanding climate change and biodiversity together as a system, with insights into carbon farming, food production and energy.
• Biodiversity and conservation science - using evidence and creating effective positive change through disciplines such as environmental forensics.

The Australian Centre for Evolutionary Biology & Biodiversity is one way in which cross-disciplinary collaborations in biodiversity projects are being realised. Climate change is a major and immediate threat to biodiversity and the expertise within the Global Ecology Lab is also a factor contributing to the strength of biodiversity research in the Environment Institute.

Listen to Global Ecology Lab co-Directors, Professor Barry Brook & Professor Corey Bradshaw, talk about the impacts of climate change and ecological prediction: