Averting Disaster: New Ways to Assess Bushfire Risk and Building Integrity. This project aims to develop a new method of assessing bushfire risk and building integrity using drone-based advanced technologies and computational fluid dynamics based heat transfer modelling for buildings located in bushfire prone areas. This coupled approach will enable the evaluation of bushfire effects on buildings and provide pre-bushfire condition/risk assessments, and site-specific cost-effective remedial actio ....Averting Disaster: New Ways to Assess Bushfire Risk and Building Integrity. This project aims to develop a new method of assessing bushfire risk and building integrity using drone-based advanced technologies and computational fluid dynamics based heat transfer modelling for buildings located in bushfire prone areas. This coupled approach will enable the evaluation of bushfire effects on buildings and provide pre-bushfire condition/risk assessments, and site-specific cost-effective remedial actions to reduce or eliminate bushfire damage and mitigate the risks pre-bushfire season. The new method will be applied to three selected buildings through which further enhancements and validations can be achieved. This project will showcase how the selected buildings and their components can be made bushfire safe.Read moreRead less
Understanding and controlling bioavailability: passive dosing of persistent organic pollutants into recombinant cell bioassays. Bioassays with mammalian cell lines may replace animal testing in chemical risk assessment if issues with limited sensitivity can be overcome for very hydrophobic chemicals such as polychlorinated dibenzodioxins. The project will solve this problem by developing a polymer-release dosing technique that assures defined and constant exposure.
A balancing act: Resolving coastal wetland water, carbon and solute fluxes. Coastal wetlands offer an impressive capacity to regulate the Earth’s climate by altering the way carbon dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere and stored while simultaneously influencing the water cycle, thus providing ecosystem services such as carbon storage, abating flood waters, improving water quality and protecting the coastline from sea level rise. This project aims to address the current gaps in understanding .... A balancing act: Resolving coastal wetland water, carbon and solute fluxes. Coastal wetlands offer an impressive capacity to regulate the Earth’s climate by altering the way carbon dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere and stored while simultaneously influencing the water cycle, thus providing ecosystem services such as carbon storage, abating flood waters, improving water quality and protecting the coastline from sea level rise. This project aims to address the current gaps in understanding the critical exchanges of water and greenhouse gases (GHGs) combining field methodologies and hydrological models, under different climatic conditions. The intended outcomes will benefit management of GHG emissions, coastal flooding and vulnerable groundwater dependent habitats.Read moreRead less
Realistic assessment of biomarker transformation in the wastewater system. Wastewater-based epidemiology is an internationally recognised cost-effective tool to monitor population exposure to chemicals and infectious diseases including Covid-19. However, in-sewer degradation of critical biomarkers can limit their wastewater-based epidemiology suitability. This project aims to systematically evaluate the stability of a new suite of potential biomarkers and conduct the first Australia-wide assessm ....Realistic assessment of biomarker transformation in the wastewater system. Wastewater-based epidemiology is an internationally recognised cost-effective tool to monitor population exposure to chemicals and infectious diseases including Covid-19. However, in-sewer degradation of critical biomarkers can limit their wastewater-based epidemiology suitability. This project aims to systematically evaluate the stability of a new suite of potential biomarkers and conduct the first Australia-wide assessment on the impact of biomarker stability on wastewater-based epidemiology estimates using wastewater samples from ~65% of the Australian population. The project expects to generate knowledge to expand the application of wastewater-based epidemiology to reliably quantify exposure and status of well-being even in remote areasRead moreRead less
Exposure mapping - combining wastewater analysis with human biomonitoring. This project aims to develop a spatial and temporal understanding of chemical exposure in the Australian population. The project will use wastewater samples collected from over 100 catchments (65% of Australian population) during the 2016 Census to spatially resolve human exposure to chemicals. These data will then form the basis for focused human biomonitoring using pooled surplus pathology samples. The integration of ....Exposure mapping - combining wastewater analysis with human biomonitoring. This project aims to develop a spatial and temporal understanding of chemical exposure in the Australian population. The project will use wastewater samples collected from over 100 catchments (65% of Australian population) during the 2016 Census to spatially resolve human exposure to chemicals. These data will then form the basis for focused human biomonitoring using pooled surplus pathology samples. The integration of wastewater and biomonitoring data will allow the creation of a national hazard specific exposure map that can be compared with geospatial data on disease risk and socioeconomic indicators (via ABS information). The benefits include the capability to identify and manage exposure risks to public health.Read moreRead less
Acoustics for Large Scale Biodiversity Assessment. Aims: This project will investigate using automated acoustic recording to efficiently census biodiversity assessment at a continental scale.
Significance: To generate new techniques for analysing environmental acoustic data and assessing Australian biodiversity, verified empirical estimates of biodiversity, an understanding of causes of variation in biodiversity.
Expected outcomes: methods for large-scale and accurate assessment of biodiversity ....Acoustics for Large Scale Biodiversity Assessment. Aims: This project will investigate using automated acoustic recording to efficiently census biodiversity assessment at a continental scale.
Significance: To generate new techniques for analysing environmental acoustic data and assessing Australian biodiversity, verified empirical estimates of biodiversity, an understanding of causes of variation in biodiversity.
Expected outcomes: methods for large-scale and accurate assessment of biodiversity, enhanced capacity to detect causes of variation in biodiversity, open-source software tools for analysing environmental audio data, biodiversity datasets.
Benefits: measuring and understanding biodiversity change, allowing enhanced management, conservation, and use of Australian natural resources.
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From environmental monitoring to management: extracting knowledge about environmental events from sensor data. New, high-detail sources of environmental sensor data are useless without new methods for identifying patterns and extracting knowledge from that data. This project will develop improved techniques for interacting with environmental sensor data to assist environmental scientists and manager in understand the important events that are occurring.
Intelligent Image Retrieval from Distorted and Partial Queries for Rapid Mobile Identification of Pests Threatening Food and the Environment. Pests and diseases are major threats to the Australian food industry and environmental biosecurity. A rapid and mobile pest information retrieval system is critical to prevent a pest becoming established and devastating the region. However, automated insect image retrieval remains an unsolved challenge in the research community. This project addresses the ....Intelligent Image Retrieval from Distorted and Partial Queries for Rapid Mobile Identification of Pests Threatening Food and the Environment. Pests and diseases are major threats to the Australian food industry and environmental biosecurity. A rapid and mobile pest information retrieval system is critical to prevent a pest becoming established and devastating the region. However, automated insect image retrieval remains an unsolved challenge in the research community. This project addresses the fundamental problem of distorted and partial image query in cluttered background in order to achieve pest identification at a much earlier on-site stage. The success of this research will not only make a technical breakthrough towards retrieving objects with movable body parts, but also revolutionise the current pest detection and monitoring process.Read moreRead less
Climate impacts on grass phenology, diversity and pollen exposure. This project investigates how climate change is altering the phenology, plant diversity, and airborne pollen exposure in Australia's highly productive dry grasslands. The project is expected to answer key questions on shifting grasslands and grass pollen relationships with grass phenology and diversity by merging satellite analysis of phenology with seasonal airborne pollen measures of grass concentrations and diversity. Expect ....Climate impacts on grass phenology, diversity and pollen exposure. This project investigates how climate change is altering the phenology, plant diversity, and airborne pollen exposure in Australia's highly productive dry grasslands. The project is expected to answer key questions on shifting grasslands and grass pollen relationships with grass phenology and diversity by merging satellite analysis of phenology with seasonal airborne pollen measures of grass concentrations and diversity. Expected outcomes of this project will be better management options to safeguard allergy sufferers and improved ecological and pollen forecasts under climate change and extreme events. This project should provide important public health benefits and disease mitigation strategies to Australia's urban and remote areas.
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Remote sensing estimation of greenhouse gas emissions from floodplains in the wet-dry tropics. This project provides regional-scale estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from major floodplains in the wet-dry tropics. These estimates are required for future national carbon accounting, and are critical knowledge gaps for current global climate models.