If you’ve ever walked in a rainforest or even a greenhouse, you’ll know that the air inside is heavy with moisture. This phenomenon is caused by trees releasing water vapour through pores in their leaves called stomata. We […]
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Version 2 of the Fine-Root Ecology Database is bigger, better, and free to download and use. Fine roots are complex and dynamic structures that serve many critical roles for land plants. Their well-known importance for acquiring water and […]
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Water—or the lack of it!—is always a topic of interest to Australians, living and working as we do on the driest inhabited continent on Earth. TERN’s integrated ecosystem-observing infrastructure produces open data on multiple phenomena at the same […]
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A new study has found that vegetation plays a key role in driving hydrological non-stationarity across the Australian continent. The recent research, conducted by a team of scientists from Australia and the United States, showed runoff ratio’s sensitivity […]
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The number of waterbirds across eastern Australia’s wetlands hit another record low this year as dams and other projects in the Murray-Darling Basin undermined river health, a leading ecologist says. The 34th annual aerial survey counted 71,993 birds in as many as 2000 […]
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Back in 2010-11 Australia “greened”, as record-breaking rains triggered a boom in plant growth that removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it as carbon in the landscape. But what happened after that? Our […]
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Floodwaters can bring destruction to homes, crops and infrastructure but they can also bring life. One northern Victorian farmer, could not be happier with what the water is bringing to his property. Jamie McMaster moved to Yambuna near […]
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The FAO-method is commonly used to estimate evapotranspiration in Australia, but new research proposes two alternative methods that require less data. Droughts resulting from global climate changes have severe implications on water management, balancing, and irrigation scheduling in […]
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Land clearing is on the rise in Queensland and New South Wales, with land clearing laws being fiercely debated. In Queensland in 2013–14, 278,000 hectares of native vegetation were cleared (1.2 times the size of the Australian Capital […]
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A new satellite-based river modelling technique can account for the unique dynamics of individual water bodies. Models using Earth observation data to predict surface water availability and extent provide useful tools for sustainable management and restoration of terrestrial surface water […]
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Understanding the impacts of extreme climatic events on environmental water storage is crucial knowledge for Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Recent work by Zunyi Xie and his colleagues found that Australia gained three times more water […]
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Evapotranspiration from the global land surface has increased significantly due to increases in transpiration and interception that are only partially counteracted by decreasing soil evaporation, a new study reports. Terrestrial evaporation (ET) is a key component of the energy and water cycles over global […]
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NCI’s data and compute expertise have played an integral role in a recently launched website that provides easy access to a wide range of environmental data covering the entire country. The data, available on the Australia’s Environment in 2015 […]
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After some unusually wet years, our landscape and ecosystems have once again returned to poorer conditions that were last experienced during the Millennium Drought. That is the main conclusion of Australia’s Environment in 2015 – an environmental score […]
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With parts of Australia once again in the grip of dry conditions, understanding climate variability and its impact on water supply is increasingly important. However, new research has found that models used by hydrologists to forecast long-term changes […]
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The assessment and planning of water resources is largely a data driven exercise that is often hampered by relatively short instrumental records that limit the ability to identify long-term, near-decadal scale variability. Recent work by Michelle Ho […]
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Current climate projections indicate that Victoria is heading towards a warmer and drier environment, which will have severe impacts on the state’s water supply. A recent study by Sonya Fiddes and her colleagues found that by the […]
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Australia is a land of extremes, and famously of “droughts and flooding rains”. That’s been truer than ever in the 21st century; since 1999 the country has see-sawed from drought to deluge with surprising speed. There was the […]
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A stocktake of waterbirds in eastern Australia has shown the lowest breeding level on record. The annual aerial survey, conducted by the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW, confirmed a dramatic long-term decline in the […]
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Surface irrigation water demand in the northern Murray-Darling Basin can be better accounted when using remotely-sensed irrigation extent and rates of actual evapotranspiration in hydrologic modelling, both in terms of magnitude and temporal patterns. In their recent study […]
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