Zoology & Ecology

Saul Chemonges

Saul Chemonges

Daniel Montesinos Torres

Daniel Montesinos Torres

Claire Gely

Claire Gely

Ben Hirsch

Ben Hirsch

Stephen Williams

Stephen Williams

Myles Menz

Myles Menz

Martijn van de Pol

Martijn van de Pol

Slade Allen-Ankins

Slade Allen-Ankins

Noel Preece

Noel Preece

Conrad Hoskin

Conrad Hoskin

Southern Whiteface Research Project
Lyanne Brouwer
01 Jul 2025 - 01 Aug 2028
This project aims to monitor Southern Whiteface (SWF) populations to understand its genetic diversity, population size, and differentiation, and to clarify subspecies status using molecular genetics. It also investigates landscape-scale factors—such as vegetation and climate, including extremes—that influence SWF distribution. Additionally, it evaluates the health of populations by measuring parasite loads, nutritional condition, and body reserves.
TruForest: Founding an Australian Rainforest LiDAR Monitoring Network
Lucas Cernusak
01 Dec 2025 - 30 Nov 2026
The TruForest project aims to establish a world-leading network for laser (LiDAR) scanning of Australia's rainforests. LiDAR is emerging as the most accurate tool for measuring forest structure, and hence also biomass and carbon stocks. The project intends to: (1) unite Australia's individual and institution-level LiDAR expertise, tools and data; (2) acquire cutting-edge LiDAR technology; (3) develop and test essential data procedures so that the equipment is ready for use; and (4) develop a partnership for facilitating future usage and access for anyone. The result will be useful for understanding and monitoring Australia's forests, stimulating cutting-edge science, and helping to monitor achieve environmental and climate change targets.
Predicting genetic exchange between species under climate change (Old ID 27104)
Megan Higgie
01 Apr 2021 - 30 Apr 2024
This project aims to resolve the factors that lead to the mixing of species’ gene pools, with a focus on whether climate change will increase such mixing, possibly leading to extinction by genetic swamping. The significance is that the project would improve our understanding of speciation and species’ vulnerability to rapid climate change through genetic mixing; a largely overlooked process. Key outcomes would be to generate new knowledge of a fundamental evolutionary process and extend the toolbox of biodiversity managers facing rapid environmental change. The project would benefit Australia by highlighting our unique biodiversity and scientific capability, and by training early career researchers in advanced evolutionary biology.
Reintroduction and monitoring of the Armoured Mistfrog, Litoria lorica (Old ID 31133)
Conrad Hoskin
12 Sep 2023 - 31 Dec 2026
I have a long-term research project on the monitoring and recovery of the Critically Endangered Armoured Mistfrog. I am collaborating on this with the Threatened Species Group (DES, Qld Government) to perform a reintroduction and subsequently monitor all populations for three years. This grant will fund that research.
Advanced passive acoustic monitoring to support evaluation of conservation management effectiveness
Lin Schwarzkopf
08 Jun 2026 - 30 Jun 2027
This one-year project will build on previous ecoacoustic research to investigate and test methods for applying passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to monitor, evaluate, and report on environmental condition across Commonwealth national parks. The project will focus on both recognizer development and implementation, for successful monitoring.
Listening for Deer: Acoustic Early Detection for Smarter Biosecurity
Lin Schwarzkopf
03 Jul 2026 - 30 Sep 2027
Feral deer are an expanding biosecurity threat across Australia, causing ecological damage, agricultural loss, and management challenges, particularly at low population densities, when detection is difficult. This project will rigorously test whether passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) can provide a reliable, cost-effective method for early detection of feral deer across vegetation types, seasons, and species. Most deer vocalise conspicuously during breeding, group contact, and alarm situations. We will leverage these vocal behaviours to evaluate acoustic detection success and directly compare it with conventional surveillance approaches (camera trapping). Using several year-long datasets collected across contrasting habitats, we will quantify detection probability, seasonal performance, and relative cost-efficiency of acoustic versus camera-based and eDNA based monitoring. The intended outcome is clear, evidence-based guidance on when and where acoustic monitoring is most effective for detecting low-density deer populations. By validating scalable and scientifically robust surveillance tools, this project will enhance early detection capacity, improve response times, and strengthen landscape-scale biosecurity monitoring. The results will directly support coordinated, proactive management under national feral deer strategies, helping to reduce environmental impacts, limit spread, and protect biodiversity and agricultural assets across Australia.
Baseline invasive ant fauna and impact survey in the Torres Strait (Old ID 27827)
Peter Yeeles
18 Oct 2022 - 30 Jun 2024
The project aims to collect a representative baseline sample of ant fauna on all inhabited Torres Strait islands and five communities in the northern peninsula area of Cape York. The focus is on invasive and non-native ant fauna.
Barron River Bridge Planning Study (Old ID 28979)
Conrad Hoskin
01 Mar 2023 - 01 Jun 2023
Arup Australia Pty Ltd is working with Qld Department of Transport & Main Roads to assess environmental impacts of upgrading/replacing the Barron River Bridge. Their main concern is the Critically Endangered Kuranda Treefrog, for which I am the expert. The project is to fund me to do range-wide surveys of the species to estimate current population size and the proportion of the population that may be impacted by the bridge. Additionally, my expert advice on how to mitigate impacts. I consider this ‘contract research’ because it funds research I planning to do anyway (i.e., a current range-wide survey), and that data will be used by one of my PhD students.
Northern Australia Plant Biosecurity Facility
Lucas Cernusak
01 Jan 2024 - 30 Jun 2025
This proposal aims to establish the only Australian plant quarantine facility north of the 27th parallel (Brisbane), and therefore the only one in the Australian tropics. The facility will enable effective research on tropical invasive plants, which currently can only be developed via proxy facilities far from the relevant habitats. This poses severe limitations to biosecurity research in the Australian Tropics. JCU is a leading institution in tropical environmental research, and as a broad and diverse base of biosecurity researchers that will be expand their capacity to develop world class research on plant biosecurity under safe and adequate conditions. Research ranges from the impact of reintroduction of new genotypes on weed fitness, genetic variability and sensitivity, impact of climate change on weed expansion, the role of plant-animal interactions on plant control, and others.
How plant heat stress will influence global warming this century
Alex Cheesman
01 Mar 2024 - 30 Nov 2024
Our objective is to elucidate the mechanism, from subcellular to global scale, underlying the interdependence of plants and climate during Earth's current climate transition. This century, rising CO2 will force global temperatures to increase, pushing some vegetation systems into heat stress and potentially physiological collapse, irrespective of rainfall (1). Indeed, the most vulnerable regions are humid, high rainfall zones where 'wet-bulb' temperature (the lowest temperature that an evaporating object or organism can cool to) will rise to levels known to induce physiological stress and cellular death (2). Plants crucially affect climate through stomatal regulation of transpiration, which influences partitioning of net solar radiation into heating and evaporative cooling actions at the land surface (3). Plant vulnerability to heat stress can diminish this role and promote further climate warming, but little is known of the physiological and molecular mechanisms of stomatal regulation under heat stress, or of the combined physiological and climatic conditions that generate lethal leaf temperatures. This limits our capacity to predict and prepare for the long-term effects of global warming (4). This project will unlock mechanistic information from plant molecular genetics and heat stress physiology to formulate new theory describing stomatal regulation under temperature extremes, and apply this in an Earth system modeling framework to develop tools for predicting and adapting plant-atmosphere dynamics. Our central hypothesis is that previously unrealized breakdown of the stomatal regulation mechanism under heat stress, when expressed at the landscape scale, will add a significant and as yet unforeseen enhancing feedback to climate change this century. To test this, we will undertake the first coordinated integration and scaling of the stomatal control mechanism responding to heat under high CO2, from molecular signaling through to global fluxes, to quantify the full effects of plant heat stress on regional and global climate. Genetic and physiological methods will be used to develop and validate a new leaf-scale model of stomatal regulation at high temperature. This will be implemented in Earth system simulations to re-evaluate end of century climate scenarios in the most heatvulnerable regions using improved surface energy partitioning calculations.

A new classification of savanna plant communities on the igneous rock lowlands and Tertiary sandy plain landscapes of Cape York Peninsula bioregion

Not everyone wants roads: assessing Indigenous people’s support for roads in a globally important tiger conservation landscape

  • 2018
  • Springer
  • Researchers:Miriam GoosemSusan LauranceWilliam Laurance

Rainforest trees respond to drought by modifying their hydraulic architecture

Pan-tropical prediction of forest structure from the largest trees

A new species of velvet gecko (Diplodactylidae: Oedura) from sandstone habitats of inland north Queensland, Australia

Disentangling causes of seasonal infection prevalence patterns: tropical tadpoles and chytridiomycosis as a model system

Trails on trial: which human uses are OK for protected areas?

Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change

If you can’t build well, then build nothing at all

Climate and soils together regulate photosynthetic carbon isotope discrimination within C-3 plants worldwide

Title: ARC Future Fellow ($680,000), Global Change: Rainforest responses to experimental drought
Reseracher: Susan Laurance (Professor, Personal Chair)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2014
Title: American Society of Naturalists
Reseracher: Megan Higgie (Associate Professor)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2003
Title: European Research Council Advanced Grant 2018, ($2.5 million Euros). Role: collaborator, Lead Investigator: Dr Lourens Poorter
Reseracher: Susan Laurance (Professor, Personal Chair)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2018
Title: Habilitation (Venia Docendi), University of Bern
Reseracher: Myles Menz (Senior Lecturer, Zoology and Ecology)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2013
End Date: 01 Jan 2018
Title: PhD, The University of Western Australia
Reseracher: Myles Menz (Senior Lecturer, Zoology and Ecology)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2009
End Date: 01 Jan 2013
Title: MSc in Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern
Reseracher: Myles Menz (Senior Lecturer, Zoology and Ecology)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2006
End Date: 01 Jan 2008
Title: Bachelor of Science , The University of Western Australia
Reseracher: Myles Menz (Senior Lecturer, Zoology and Ecology)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2000
End Date: 01 Jan 2003
Title: Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand
Reseracher: Tasmin Rymer (Associate Professor)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2004
End Date: 01 Jan 2009
Title: Minibeast Wildlife, I partnered with Minibeast Wildlife to support an Honour's student's project focusing on subsociality in tarantulas. That work is in the process of being published.
Reseracher: Tasmin Rymer (Associate Professor)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2024
End Date: 01 Jan 2025
Title: Master of Science, University of Pretoria
Reseracher: Tasmin Rymer (Associate Professor)
Start Date: 01 Jan 2003
End Date: 01 Jan 2004