[Aqualist] ARC DECRA's announced (DE25)

[Simon Haberle]

Dear AQUA members,

Please find below a list of successful candidates in the fields broadly related to Quaternary research (including archaeology) for the ARC DECRAs announced today.

Congratulations to all those who were successful.

The success rate was 18% which means a large number of people will have missed out. I’m sure there were many great projects worthy of support that were not successful in such a large field. Please remember to provide support and encouragement for those who have taken the time and energy to submit a proposal but were not successful this time around.

Regards, Simon

Prof Simon Haberle
Director, School of Culture, History & Language
Professor of Natural History & Palaeoecology

ANU College of Asia & the Pacific
Coombs Building (Rm 3.378), Fellows Rd
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 2600


ARC DECRA


Australian National University

DE250100071 Dr Georgina Falster
Quantifying Australia's long-term risk of rainfall extremes. Rainfall extremes, such as droughts and floods, severely impact the Australian economy and society. This project aims to quantify the range of Australian rainfall extremes during past centuries—including long-lasting events beyond recent experience. This will allow accurate assessment of Australia's rainfall risk in the coming decades, by accounting for natural rainfall variability as well as human-caused climate change. Geochemical data and numerical methods developed in this project have applications for water security and biosecurity, and will transform future research into long-term climate risk. This should provide significant benefits for water resource managers, allowing preparation for rainfall extremes we might face in the future.
$438,335.00

DE250100767 Dr Mathieu Leclerc
Shifting foodways: biomolecular archaeology and oral traditions in Vanuatu.
Food is a key way of understanding connections between past and present communities. This project aims to investigate how ancestral culinary practices in the Oceanic region have evolved over time using residues preserved in pottery. Working in collaboration with communities in Vanuatu, it expects to generate new knowledge of how populations have adapted their diet and developed sustainable food practices whilst navigating through environmental and cultural changes. Expected outcomes include a model for integrating traditional knowledge into contemporary development and food security strategies. This should lead to benefits including increased community resilience and better preparedness for future food and climate vulnerabilities.
$486,506.00

DE250100663 Dr Siavash Ghelichkhan
Sea Level in the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period: Unveiling Earth's mantle Effects.
This project aims to revise our understanding of sea-level change in the mid-Pliocene warm period, a period that closely mirrors the high greenhouse gas levels we anticipate in the coming decades, by looking into solid-Earth contributions. It does so by utilising innovative variational data-assimilation methods that are developed for Geosciences, which enable the assimilation of various observational datasets into models, to reconstruct Earth’s mantle evolution. By connecting mid-Pliocene’s surface movement to other geological observables of various periods, we are able to generate and validate a benchmark for future studies of global sea-level rise and climate change.
$474,781.00

DE250100004 Dr Alexander Skeels
How environmental change drives the origin and decline of biodiversity.
This project aims to measure the effects of past environmental change on the emergence of biodiversity in Indo-Australasia. By integrating high-resolution reconstructions of past environments and new simulation models, this project expects to generate new knowledge on the way biodiversity develops in a mega-diverse and climatically dynamic region. Anticipated outcomes include: an open-source historical environmental database, innovative new methods and software tools for the global research community, and a deeper understanding of the responses of organisms to environmental change. Significant benefits include identifying groups of species that have been vulnerable to historical environmental change to help predict future vulnerability.
$486,675.00


University of Melbourne

DE250100281 Dr Vera Korasidis
Terrestrial ecosystem resilience to atmospheres enriched in carbon dioxide.
This project aims to unlock a hidden record of our planet’s resilience to high carbon dioxide levels. Through analysing fossil pollen and charcoal preserved in sedimentary rocks, this project aims to generate new knowledge of the potential impact of climate change on forests, as well as the controls on fire frequency and intensity under greenhouse conditions. Expected outcomes include new methods for interpreting our planet’s environmental history, with improved understanding of the environmental conditions that control extinction versus adaptation in plants. This will provide significant benefits to our society and industry such as informing current vegetation adaptation efforts and improving model forecasts for future climate change.
$477,076.00


Monash University

DE250100964 Dr Christopher Urwin
Asian voyagers and First Nations people in Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria.
This project aims to investigate little-known encounters between Asian voyagers and First Nations people in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria through new archaeological investigations and Indigenous oral histories. The project expects to generate new knowledge of how First Nations and Asian people shaped coastal sites and one another, using a combination of precise carbon dating and artefact analyses with Indonesian collaborators and utilising First Nations accounts of Asian visits. Expected outcomes include more accurate chronologies for these interactions. Social and cultural benefits include a deeper understanding of Australia’s internationalised First Nations heritage and better conservation of threatened Indigenous coastal sites.
$482,017.00


University of New South Wales

DE250100260 Dr Abhirup Dikshit
Is there a link between flash drought and bushfires?
This project aims to quantify the influence of flash drought on bushfires. The project expects to generate new knowledge on the unexplored concerns relating to the anecdotal relationship between flash drought and bushfires. It will extend an innovative approach combining new-generation geostationary satellites with very high-resolution regional climate modeling to quantify flash drought-fire relationships, examine land-atmosphere feedback processes, and predict flash droughts using machine learning. Expected outcomes include enhanced methods to better understand flash droughts and their relationship to bushfires. It should provide significant benefits to the planning for, and management of, flash droughts and bushfires in the future.
$433,451.00


University of Tasmania

DE250100147 Dr Lavenia Ratnarajah
Assessing impacts of ocean warming on carbon export in the Southern Ocean.
Marine zooplankton consume ~75% of phytoplankton primary production and play a major role in the biologically mediated export of carbon into the deep ocean. Despite their importance, the cycling of carbon by zooplankton is the largest source of uncertainty in global climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This DECRA project will apply a suite of laboratory and field-based approaches, and numerical models, to quantify zooplankton grazing dynamics and carbon export in the Southern Ocean under current and future ocean temperatures. Results from this study will be used to improve how zooplankton are represented in global climate models to better predict changes in marine carbon cycling in a changing climate.
$470,255.00

DE250100098 Dr Edward Doddridge
Southern Ocean Heat Fluxes: Melting Ice and Global Oceanic Circulations.
This project aims to understand what controls the transport of heat polewards to the Antarctic margin. This heat transport determines the rate at which ice shelves melt, and thereby controls the Antarctic contribution to sea level rise. Expected outcomes of this research include a tool for near-real-time estimation of the Antarctic overturning circulation and accurate projections of future ocean heat transport in a changing climate. The project will provide a step-change in our understanding of the Southern Ocean. The results will provide vital information for policy makers and the general public on the future of this crucial region and its impact on Australian and global climate, sea level rise, and Antarctic sea ice.
$460,183.00


Griffith University

DE250100380 Dr Shevan Wilkin
Ochre as a preservation reservoir for archaeological biomolecules.
The use of ochre in ancient artwork and adornments is widespread. As ochre is metal oxide-rich, its antimicrobial properties act as a preservative agent for intermixed organic binding agents. This project, through proteomic analysis of ochre-laden residues on archaeological materials, will explore the plant or animal products used to facilitate ochre use in the past. Proteins can illuminate the tissues (blood, milk, saliva) mixed with ochre, allowing insights into ancient human-animal-plant interactions. The completion of this project will: 1) clearly demonstrate the viability of ochre-based residues as a reservoir for biomolecules, and 2) provide insights into primary and secondary products from wild and domesticated species in the past.
$484,941.00


James Cook University

DE250101047 Dr Alexandre Siqueira Correa
Using past climate change to predict future reef productivity.
This project aims to understand how coral reefs can sustain their high fish productivity into the future given the immediate threats of climate change. By examining ancient reefs using fossils and molecular evidence, this project expects to generate new knowledge about how historical fish productivity responded to changes in past temperature and reef condition. This knowledge will be used to predict the areas most affected by future changes in reef fish yields. These outcomes should provide significant benefits for the sustainable management of coral reefs, boosting Australia’s position as a global leader in marine conservation.
$387,590.00