ECOS

CSIRO’s efforts to help the Australian farmed prawn industry recover from this devastating outbreak also required a rapid response to protect a vital research facility that is assisting the industry pick itself back up.

The Southern Ocean has an enormously influential role on the Earth’s climate, it reaches from the Antarctic into all the world’s oceans. What research now shows is local ocean processes have global impacts.

As work gathers pace for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next climate predictions, scientists sense a groundswell of change to try and meet the Paris Agreement.

Diversity is a buzzword for the nation but when it comes to biodiversity studies done in the past decade, it turns out research has been rather one-sided.

An estimated 14 million people die from infectious diseases each year. A key link in the chain of infection is deforestation and increased contact between wild animals and humans. If we’re to control the spread of disease, we need to be better at predicting outbreaks.

We’re dusting off old tide records, some dating back to the late 19th century, in a project to digitise these old hard-copy records so the data they contain can be used to analyse how extreme sea levels in Australia have changed over time.

While knowledge of water availability is key to managing Murray-Darling Basin water resources, a commensurate understanding of ecosystem ecological response to flow regulation is also required to aid environmental management.

Scientists have been naming species after well-known people since the 18th century, often in a bid for publicity. But the issue deserves attention – some 400,000 Australian species are yet to be described.

There’s an upside to the carbon-rich, black water that sometimes flows off the floodplains and into the rivers of the Murray–Darling Basin.