#Ecosystem management

Understanding human impact on the water cycle is a tricky business - one clue is to be found in evapotranspiration. Novel use of satellite data is helping us measure something we can't see.

Three quarters of the species that live in Australia don’t exist anywhere else in the world. We're digitisation our collections to make the data easily available to have bigger impacts in areas like conservation, biosecurity and climate change.

For the first time, scientists have quantified how much water trees on the Murray-Darling floodplain need, and when they need it. The results show that we cannot tell the health of a tree just by looking at its canopy—we need to look inside the tree.

Timm Döbert spent three years working towards his PhD based in a research camp in Borneo’s lowland rainforests. It was a chance to study close at hand the human impact on a diverse ecosystem – and a privileged opportunity to marvel at the diversity of life on Earth. It’s also a photographer’s paradise. He and colleagues have shared with us some of their favourite images.

In Northern Australia, researchers have Gamba grass in their sights. They're applying cutting-edge advances in satellite, airborne and terrestrial remote sensing along with emerging tools in computer vision and machine learning to address environmental challenges such as invasive species.

Following decades of heavy trawling off the north-west shelf of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers are back to assess how the region has recovered, providing scientific advice to guide sustainable fishing practices both in Australia and internationally.

Industrial-scale whaling brought many of the world’s largest animals to the brink of extinction. Now that numbers are recovering, researchers are taking a detailed look at the trajectory of the Southern Ocean’s baleen whale populations.

Marlee Hutton is contributing to a better understanding of west coast marine ecosystems and learning about the role science can play in the issues her and her community in the Kimberley care about.

Indigenous Ranger groups in The Kimberley have partnered with CSIRO to get a better understanding of one of the largest remaining populations of dugongs in the world and keep a key part of their culture strong.