At a twilight ceremony held early this month in the evocative surroundings of the Melbourne Zoo, the University of Melbourne celebrated the formal launch of its partnership with Zoos Victoria. Gabrielle Murphy details how the research and knowledge flowing from the partnership between these two iconic Melbourne institutions will help save animal species from extinction.
The Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA) was established in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne on March 1st, 2006, a result of a Federal Government election commitment.
ARCUE is an initiative of the School of Botany, and a division of the Melbourne Botanical Garden.
CAPIM is a consortium of world class researchers from The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Water, DPI (Vic), RMIT, and EPA (Vic).
CREEL aims to engage in these legal matters with respect to contemporary developments and issues in Australia, Asia-Pacific, internationally, and in selected regions.
CEED tackles the key gaps in environmental decision-making, monitoring and adaptive management through an integrated research program.
AEDA is a joint research program that seeks to develop and test ideas, tools and methods to support decision making for better environmental management. The University of Melbourne is one of a number of Australian university research partners.
Increases in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) concentrations are believed to be the primary drivers of the greenhouse effect and the changes and increasing variability in global climate conditions.
Australia has a poor record on extinction; more than 100 species of plants and animals are documented has having become extinct over the last 200 years, including a number of mammal species. There are also likely to be many undocumented cases, particularly involving invertebrates. There are now several hundred species of plants and animals threatened with extinction. Moreover many of our habitats including grasslands and wetlands are threatened by encroaching development, invasive species and climate change. Once habitats are lost, entire communities of plants and animals are likely to disappear. This loss of biodiversity threatens the uniqueness of our environment as well as its natural processes.
To reduce extinction risks and protect habitats, a national reserve system has been established, which gives various levels of protection to threatened habitats. Recovery programs have been established for some of our most threatened species. However, these programs have had limited success due to predation from exotic animals or competition from invasive weeds. Moreover threatened populations have often lost genetic resilience, due to existing for many years at a very low population size; this makes long term recovery difficult unless populations are carefully managed over long periods of time. Climate change creates additional challenges for recovery programs, because protected habitats may become unsuitable for species after they have been restored to the wild.
