A North Queensland university will use museum collections to predict how climate change will impact the world’s future food security.
James Cook University Associate Professor Sue-Ann Watson said billions of people depended on marine resources for food security and livelihoods and environmental change was altering marine ecosystems globally at unprecedented rates.
Associate Professor Watson said Townsville-based researchers would use a million-dollar Australian Research Council grant to predict the effect of climate change on ocean-based food sources.
She said the innovative project would use museum collections to determine how marine species and ecosystems had already responded to change, allowing an understanding of the past, present and projected future effects on hundreds of species.
“Current understanding of the combined effects of environmental change across biodiverse species in wild ecosystems is limited,” Dr Watson said.
“We will use untapped data from tens of thousands of specimens collected over the past three centuries to analyse the responses of more than 300 species to drivers of change over the last 100-300 years.”
Dr Watson said the project would focus on animals without backbones (invertebrates), which represent 92 percent of marine animal species.
“The museum material is already curated and catalogued with associated metadata such as species identification, collection date and location.
“We will be able to determine which species and ecosystems are adapting or declining so we can deliver practical management and conservation advice within Australia and globally,” Dr Watson said.
She said the research was designed to be adopted into policies and programmes.
“The data will feed directly into conservation assessments of marine invertebrates, the majority of which have never been assessed at the Australian or international level,” said Dr Watson.
