[Aqualist] Resend: ARC DP projects announced

[Simon Haberle]

Dear Colleagues (resending message with 2 additional DPs from UTas),

The ARC have recently announced the outcomes of the Discovery Projects for 2025. Successful projects broadly related to Quaternary research (including archaeology) are listed below, and as always, congratulations to those who were successful.

Overall, there where 11 DPs funded to around $8.0M  (compared to last year when there were 4 DPs totalling $2.2M).

It is also important to acknowledge the huge amount of effort and sacrifice of time that is required to submit these grants. To those who were not successful, thank you for continuing to generate great ideas and push the boundaries of our disciplines. Hopefully there will be future opportunities to fund the great work you are doing.

Best wishes for 2025, Simon

__________________________

ARC DISCOVERY PROJECTS DP25

The Australian National University

DP250102214
Associate Professor Stuart Bedford; Associate Professor Christopher Ballard; Dr Rosey Billington; Associate Professor Nicholas Thieberger; Professor Thegn Ladefoged; Ms Anna Naupa; Mr Richard Shing; Mr Edson Willie
Transformed landscapes: 3000 years of adaptation and resilience in Vanuatu.
This project aims to explore the history of dramatic human modification of a Pacific Island landscape over the past 3000 years and draws out the implications of these transformations for future generations in a changing global climate. Since initial settlement, the island of Efate in Vanuatu has been spectacularly altered by a series of socio-agrosystems, recently revealed by LiDAR aerial imagery. This transdisciplinary project will combine field and archival research by archaeologists, historians and linguists to map social and agricultural development across Efate, generating a deep-time perspective that will inform responses to contemporary challenges around population growth and food security in the Pacific. $461,729.00


DP250104228
Associate Professor Raymond Tobler; Professor Susan O'Connor; Dr Shimona Kealy; Dr Antoinette Schapper; Associate Professor Herawati Sudoyo
Mapping the bio-cultural impact of Papuan migrations into Wallacea.
This project aims to explore the movement of Papuan genes, culture, and languages into Wallacea in the past 15,000 years. Multidisciplinary evidence suggests that New Guinea has been a key bio-cultural progenitor for contemporary Wallacean societies, though the underlying historical movements and exchange mechanisms remain poorly understood. By generating and integrating complementary genetic, linguistic, and archaeological records from East Nusa Tenggara and West Papua, this project will illuminate the historical processes and peoples that have shaped modern Wallacean society. Expected outcomes include a comprehensive re-evaluation of New Guinea's role as a bio-cultural hub in one of the most diverse but understudied regions on the planet. $998,754.00


DP250100759
Dr Adele Morrison; Professor Matthew England; Dr Madelaine Gamble Rosevear
Improving projections of the risk of ocean-driven Antarctic ice melt.
The risk of continued ocean-driven ice loss from Antarctica is profound, with marine terminating ice sheets locking up tens of meters of potential global sea level rise. Yet sea level projections are highly uncertain, in part as the numerical models used for making these projections are missing key ocean processes. This project aims to better constrain future rates of sea level rise from Antarctic ice melt by developing new fundamental understanding of the complex ocean processes that drive melting and by transforming the representation of ocean–ice shelf interactions in Australia’s next-generation global ocean model. This will benefit future adaptation of Australia's coastal infrastructure, tourism and natural resource sectors. $540,000.00


University of Canberra

DP250100663
Dr Leonie Wain; Dr Melissa Marshall; Dr Tristen Jones; Professor Penelope King; Professor Dikai Liu; Professor Andrei Rode; Dr Ksenia Maximova
Conserving heritage in stone: culture and lasers in partnership.
There is an urgent worldwide need to find an effective method to conserve heritage, such as Indigenous sandstone rock art sites which are at risk of permanent loss. This project aims to develop an innovative approach to rock art conservation by integrating Indigenous knowledge into decision-making processes, while pioneering the use of new femtosecond (fs) lasers for cleaning stone without causing surface damage, and robotic control of the fs laser system. Expected outcomes include a novel governance framework, and a sustainable method for preserving culture. This should yield significant benefits across environmental, cultural and economic sectors, protecting the environment, and enhancing cultural tourism and Indigenous job opportunities.  1,004,964.00


The University of Queensland

DP250104103
Professor Christopher Clarkson
The stone toolkit of the first Homo sapiens from Africa to Australia.
This project aims to explore the technological variability of Homo sapiens in their expansion out of Africa to Australia over the last 200,000 years. The project expects to generate new knowledge in the areas of archaeology and human origins by employing groundbreaking 3D computational analysis of stone tools found in sites spanning the period of Homo sapiens expansion. Expected outcomes of this project are to understand the technological underpinning of our forebears' successful expansion out of Africa, their replacement of other hominin species, and the pace and routes of expansion. This should provide significant benefits in understanding human evolution and the resilience of our species in the face of major climate change. $551,479.00


The University of Adelaide

DP250103420
Associate Professor Jonathan Tyler; Dr Haidee Cadd; Dr Linda Armbrecht; Dr Alexander Francke; Professor Michelle Waycott; Associate Professor Michela Mariani
Climate, fire and Kangaroo Island: resolving the past to manage the future.
Bushfire impact depends on interacting factors (e.g., people, vegetation, and climate) that complicate development of fire mitigation and conservation strategies. Our project aims to explore the unique Australian case of Kangaroo Island, where traditional land management putatively ceased ~4,100 years ago, to unravel the effects of climate, vegetation and people on changing fire regimes. By combining a suite of novel analytical techniques, including sedimentary ancient DNA and organic biomarkers for fire and people, we seek to develop complimentary records of climate and environment. Our aim is to develop new knowledge to inform sustainable fire management and biodiversity conservation both on the island and across south-eastern Australia. $751,276.00

DP250100172
Dr Alexander Francke; Associate Professor Timothy Cohen; Associate Professor Lee Arnold; Associate Professor Kathryn Amos
Tracking 600,000 years of flooding and aridification in Australia’s deserts.
This project aims to provide unprecedented understanding of how tropical rainfall promotes excessive wet pulses and floods in Australia’s iconic dry, desert interior. This is achieved by developing a 600,000 year record of tropical rainfall and river runoff to the desert, becoming the longest and most continuous sedimentary climate record from the Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre Basin. Outcomes will unravel the global climate conditions that fostered extensive wet pulses in the past, providing unprecedented reference for the period of human migration and extinction of megafauna during the last 65,000 years. Outcomes will also inform how the desert responds to flooding, relevant to constrain risk to agriculture, infrastructure, and ecologic habitats. $545,825.00


The University of Sydney

DP250102180
Professor Jody Webster; Professor Helen McGregor; Professor Gregory Webb; Associate Professor Tristan Salles; Professor Andrea Dutton; Professor Dr Juan Braga; Professor Yusuke Yokoyama
Unravelling sea level, climate and coral reef responses to global change.
The Earth’s climate has swung between intervals with massive ice sheets to times where ice sheets retreated. The impact of these transitions on sea level, tropical/subtropical seasonal climate and their consequences for coral reefs are not well understood. This project will investigate a globally unique sequence of drowned fossil reefs offshore Hawaii to decipher in unprecedented detail rapid changes in these impacts during transitions in ice sheet extent over the past 500,000 years. We will advance our understanding of the fundamental drivers of sea level, tropical/subtropical climate and coral reef ecosystem responses during periods of major and abrupt climate instability. $1,081,809.00


La Trobe University

DP250101228
Professor Andrew Herries; Associate Professor Justin Adams; Dr Angeline Leece; Professor Dr JOSE BRAGA; Dr Stephanie Caruana; Dr Mathieu Duval; Professor David Strait
The origins of our direct ancestor Homo erectus and its contemporaries.
The project aims to investigate the origins of the early human species Homo erectus, our direct ancestor, and other contemporary early human species around 2 million years ago. The project expects to do this by expanding on our discovery of fossils of the oldest evidence of Homo erectus and Paranthropus from Drimolen Cave in South Africa. The project will generate new knowledge by the excavation and analysis of a newly discovered partial skeleton, thought to be Homo erectus, from Drimolen, and the dating of a newly discovered, unique skull from Kromdraai Cave. Expected outcomes and benefits of the project include a better understanding of the shared ancestry of the multi-cultural society that is Australia and all modern humans alive today. $715,617.00


University of Tasmania

DP250102853
Professor Matt King; Professor Poul Christoffersen; Associate Professor Daniel Goldberg; Professor Helen Fricker
Rapid response of Antarctic ice streams to decadal climate perturbations.
The rate of sea-level rise in coming decades depends heavily on how fast the West Antarctic Ice Sheet changes. This project aims to tightly define the uncertain ice-bed physics that will govern that rate of change. The project is based on recent observations of rapid, climatologically forced changes in the glacier elevation, and focuses on near-instant responses to climate-varying melt of downstream ice shelves. Existing models of ice-shelf/ice-stream dynamics will be perturbed by climatological changes in ice-shelf melt and the modelled perturbations in upstream strain and elevation compared with observations. This will allow us to better predict the speed at which the ice sheet will change due to changes in ocean driven-melting. $582,472.00

DP250100886
Dr Linda Armbrecht; Dr João Teixeira; Dr Jane Younger; Associate Professor Christopher Bolch; Dr Leonie Suter; Dr Alexandra Post
The invisible past: Antarctic ecosystem evolution unlocked by ancient DNA.
This project aims to investigate marine organism responses to ecosystem change around Antarctica by using an innovative approach of sedimentary ancient DNA, evolutionary and population genetics. New knowledge will be generated on rates at which keystone marine organisms (e.g., phytoplankton, Antarctic krill) adapt to environmental change. Expected outcomes include the most comprehensive, circum-Antarctic sedimentary ancient DNA dataset to date providing marine ecosystem evolution information spanning, at least, 1 million years. Integrating this with population genetics surveys on modern organisms will allow improved predictions of ecosystem responses to climate change, ultimately benefitting targeted conservation efforts in Antarctica. $767,430.00

____________________________

Prof Simon Haberle
Professor of Natural History & Palaeoecology
Director, Canberra Pollen Monitoring Program
School of Culture, History and Language
College of Asia & the Pacific
Coombs Building (Rm 3.218), Fellows Rd
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 2600
+61 2 6125 5125 (ph)  0424453861 (mob)