Sustaining life
Tue, 03 Oct 2017A love for Australia’s wildlife lies at the core of our nation’s identity. It sustains our wellbeing. That is something that Dr Leonie Valentine can personally attest to as her passion for wildlife has helped her through good times and bad. Here she explains how.
I’ve wanted to be a zoologist since I was 4. It began with a field trip in the rainforests of Queensland’s Wet Tropics, an expedition led by the renowned
zoologist George Heinsohn. The story goes (for truth be said I can’t remember much of this, it’s a story my father recounts) that I followed George
around, watching him capture and identify all sorts of animals. I informed my parents that this is what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Top Image: Leonie with a quenda (also known as a southern brown bandicoot). Once common throughout many parts of coastal Australia, the quenda now only persists in isolated pockets in some urban and peri-urban reserves, where Leonie’s research is investigating their role in ecosystem restoration. These prodigious diggers are believed to play an important ecosystems engineering role by cycling nutrients and distributing seed and fungus. Photo: Mason Crane
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Appeasing Bluetongue Managing fire in the Great Sandy Desert
Tue, 13 Aug 2019Karajarri Rangers are leading a Threatened Species Recovery Hub research project to investigate how different fire management approaches affect biodiversity. The first field trip took place in April this year, when a team of 16 rangers, support staff and scientists journeyed to the Edgar Ranges for eight days of wildlife monitoring. Hub researcher Sarah Legge worked with the rangers to compile this report from the field.
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Changing the way research is driven
Tue, 13 Aug 2019Cissy Gore-Birch is a member of the Threatened Species Recovery Hub’s steering committee and the Chair of its Indigenous Reference Group. The Indigenous Reference Group was established to assist hub leaders and project teams to strengthen the engagement and participation of Indigenous people in the hub’s activities and research projects. Cissy recently attended the Species of the Desert Festival on the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area, where she spoke about both threatened and culturally important species, and increasing the voice of Indigenous people in environmental policies and research.
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Indigenous people critical for threatened species
Tue, 13 Aug 2019Dr Sally Box, the Australian Government’s Threatened Species Commissioner, talks about the importance of working with Indigenous groups to conserve Australia’s threatened species.
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Got a possum in your backyard? We’d love to know
Wed, 17 Jul 2019Researchers from the Threatened Species Recovery Hub are calling on citizen scientists to help them learn more about Australia’s possums and gliders by recording sightings in a new, free app. Dr Rochelle Steven from the University of Queensland is passionate about Australia’s possums and gliders and believes people in the community can do a lot to help support conservation, especially in urban areas.
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Australia’s possums and gliders
Tue, 09 Jul 2019There are 27 different types of possums and gliders in Australia. They have a huge variety of sizes, shapes and appearances. We’ve compiled a profile on every species here. One quarter of our possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law. Help their conservation, be a citizen scientist: you can record sightings of possums from your local areas in the free 'CAUL Urban Wildlife App'.
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