Alpine ecology research threatened by funding cuts

A renewed federal funding programme is urgently needed to maintain and expand long-term biodiversity research in Australia’s alpine areas, a Senate inquiry has been told.

Ian Mansergh, deputy director of La Trobe University’s research centre for applied alpine ecology in Melbourne, says that “chronic underfunding” is undermining long-term monitoring projects that have been operating for almost 70 years across alpine ecosystems in Victoria and New South Wales.

“The Australian Alps is a National Heritage Bioregion that is environmentally significant. The region is also critically vulnerable to climate change,” he says in a submission to a Senate inquiry into conservation of Australia’s threatened species.