ARC grant to fund savanna, fire research

A Charles Darwin University research team has won a $380,000 Australian Research Council grant to improve understanding of how tropical savanna functions and the impact of fire on rangeland.

CDU’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President Research and Research Training Professor Lawrence Cram said the Australian Research Council announced the funding this morning as part of its 2016 round of the Linkage Projects scheme.

Professor Cram said the project, to be undertaken through the School of Environment, would focus on the decline in granivorous finches across northern Australia and test whether the birds’ increasingly nomadic lifestyle, associated with tracking grass seed availability over larger areas, was the cause.

The project also aimed to evaluate how fire affected rangeland functioning, particularly grass diversity, with the goal of improving fire management in tropical savannas of northern Australia.

He said the project was expected to produce new tools and technologies that would monitor mobile small vertebrates.

Professor Cram congratulated the team on securing the funding.

“This is a particularly important project in advancing understanding of the environment of northern Australia,” he said.