Environmental Science

News

SELS secures additional $460,000 funding

24 March 2010

The School for Environmental and Life Sciences (SELS) has successfully secured an additional $460,000 in funding, through the new Commonwealth-funded initiative the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).

TERN aims to bring ecological research into a high-capacity data archive to facilitate information sharing, making research findings available and accessible to researchers across Australia.

SELS researcher Lindsay Hutley said the two-year funding would be used for two research projects - $220,000 for ongoing research measuring carbon dioxide sequestriation and $240,000 for a new remote sensoring project.

"We will utilise about half the funding to expand our collaborative project with Monash University, researching carbon dioxide sequestriation and water in the tropical savannahs," Dr Hutley said.

"The $220,000 will be used to cover the salary of an additional research assistant, purchase hardware and equipment, and cover remote and field deployment costs, such as transportation."

SELS's Tropical Spatial Sciences Group researcher Dr Stefan Maier said the remaining $240,000 would be used for a new remote sensoring project, related to fire mapping.

"In Australia, the most important land management variable is fire, you can't consider climate and landscape changes without considering fire, about 30 percent of the north Australian landscape burns every year," Dr Maier said.

"The funding will fund part of my salary and cover the costs associated with field work, infrastructure and transport."

The TERN initiative has provided first-round funding of $20 million in total, secured by about 20 universities across Australia including CDU. The second round of TERN funding is $35 million.

"Building on our successful bid in first-round funding, we are hoping to be well-placed to secure additional second-round funding," Dr Hutley said.

"TERN is administered by the University of Queensland, I'm looking forward to meeting with the Director of TERN in Darwin on April 13 to further discuss our research projects."