Overview | Research Team | Partner Team

Overview

Shaun Cunningham, Jim Thomson, Ross Thompson, Jason Beringer, Tim Cavagnaro, Ralph Mac Nally, Patrick Baker, Mark Eigenraam and Leon Metzeling

Reforestation is important for reducing atmospheric carbon and potentially mitigating climate change.  Competing demands for water yields, agricultural productivity, carbon storage and biodiversity must be balanced to create sustainable catchments under a drying climate in southern Australia. ‘The Carbon Project’ aims to develop a robust modelling platform for carbon and water fluxes of a range of land use practices at a scale that is relevant to land management – the whole Goulburn-Broken catchment!

This project assembles an expert team including the ACB’s combined strengths of micrometeorology (Beringer), forest ecology (Baker), soil processes (Cavagnaro), terrestrial ecology, landscape modelling (Mac Nally), freshwater ecology (Thompson), external expertise in landscape economics (Eigenraam, DSE Victoria) and freshwater biodiversity (Metzeling, EPA Victoria), and two research fellows that have experience across these areas (Cunningham & Thomson). This research is funded by an ARC Linkage grant with substantial contributions from the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (Economics Unit, River Health Division), Catchment Management Authorities (Goulburn Broken, North Central), EPA Victoria and the investment company Kilter. 

To predict the effect of increasing reforestation on the Goulburn Broken catchment, we need to quantify the water use, carbon storage and biodiversity value of different land uses. We will begin with a review of the current understanding of how tree cover affects carbon and water fluxes, and biodiversity in southern Australia. This will involve a compiling existing datasets into a spatial database, which will build on the Environmental Systems Modelling Platform (EnSym) developed by DSE Victoria, and producing a detailed land use map of the catchment.  This process will reveal knowledge gaps to be addressed by field surveys, and potential sites for intensive measurements and broad surveys of the catchment.

We will measure carbon and water fluxes across the soil-water-plant-atmosphere continuum and biodiversity values intensively at core sites. These sites will be situated within the agricultural zone that is most likely to be converted to carbon farming. Core sites will be selected within major land uses: dryland agriculture, reforestation (of a range of ages) and mature forest. Broad surveys of key indicators of carbon and water fluxes, and biodiversity will used to strengthen the representativeness of our understanding at the catchment scale.

Changes to whole catchment carbon, water and biodiversity budgets under future scenarios will be estimated by scaling up relationships determined from core measurement sites and broad surveys across the range of land uses. The approach used will be based on populating existing large-scale models developed by EnSym.  We will use these models to explore (1) how governmental or market-based incentives might be used to influence uptake by landholders of biodiverse carbon farming practices, (2) how the interaction of future climates will affect the productivity of carbon farming and (3) how the interaction of future climates and pricing scenarios will drive establishment of carbon farming across the Goulburn Broken catchment.

For further information:

Dr Shaun Cunningham
Tel.: +61 3 9902 0142
Fax: +61 3 9905 5613
Email: shaun.cunningham@sci.monash.edu.au