Wet Tropics Rainforests

Program 12 will have four projects designed to assist environmental managers, industry and Indigenous and community groups to manage the Wet Tropics bioregion. This is a complex and often highly contested landscape with many competing interests.

Program 3 will have four projects focused on biodiversity drivers of Queensland’s Wet Tropics rainforests, particularly rainforest refugia and hot spots of genetic diversity in the World Heritage Area and adjacent Cape York regions. The Program will deliver species distribution models and composite biodiversity maps using long term data sets to describe patterns of environmental change. The Program will also search for remnant populations of critically endangered frogs and monitor the abundance of key vertebrate species such as the cassowary and the spectacled flying fox.

Program 7 will have three projects addressing different threats to rainforest health. A generalised analytical toolkit will be developed for assessing vulnerability to extreme climatic events, particularly the sensitivity of Wet Tropics fauna to temperature extremes. The role of fire as a driver of rainforest distribution (particularly on the threatened ecosystem of the Mabi forest) will be determined.