Stories

19 February 2019

Younger, regrowing forests are much more capable of taking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it away than older established forests...

The research trials were showcased this week on popular television program Gardening Australia for the Which Plant Where project.

7 February 2019

Researchers at Western Sydney University are using fluorescent orange and green dye powders to mark the movements of insect pollinators in enclosed glasshouses to determine whether Australian native bees are effective at pollinating fully-enclosed crops.

19 January 2019

To aid wildlife carers, land managers and public health officials in coping with such events, researchers from Western Sydney University’s Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, CSIRO, and the Bureau of Meteorology have developed a Flying Fox Heat-Stress Forecaster.

19 January 2019

Associate Professor of Ecology Ricky Spencer from the School of Science and Health at Western Sydney University and a School-based member of Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment helped lead the Australian data analysis for the first global review of the conservation status of turtles and tortoise around the world.

19 December 2018

Starve or be eaten? For small animals, this challenge must be faced every day. Searching for food is a risky business, and small animals must balance their need to eat as much as possible against the risk of being eaten themselves. New research from Western Sydney University shows how mice, and likely other small prey, resolve this problem with the help of an energy-saving mechanism known as torpor.

12 December 2018

Four Western Sydney University researchers have been ranked in the top 1% globally after earning a place on the Clarivate Analytics 2018 Highly Cited Researcher list.

12 December 2018

As our world is warming under climate change, heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense, yet the vulnerability of our wildlife to such events is poorly understood. New research from Australia’s Wet Tropics indicates that the area where maximum temperatures are survivable for the green ringtail possum could shrink by over 85 percent this century due to climate change.

18 December 2017

When we think of Christmas, what colour comes to mind? For most people, that colour is probably red. Even Santa himself is red. It’s a colour reminiscent of family, good food, Santa and his gifts and festive holidays...

6 December 2018

We owe such a lot to the humble European honeybee. For an insect that was only brought to Australia in 1822, it has become well-established as one of our most important crop-pollinating insects. But honeybees are under threat from pests and environmental changes that have caused widespread colony collapse around the world. That’s one reason why there’s growing interest in Australia’s native pollinators that keep our food and natural ecosystems ticking along.