Published: 19 September 2011

Providing Australia’s tree species knowledge to the world

Sarah Whitfield

The Australian Tree Seed Centre (ATSC) was established in the 1960s with funding from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to widely disseminate the seed of Australian tree species. It had become apparent that Australian trees – widely adaptable and especially suited to challenging and degraded environments – could help alleviate some of the unsustainable pressure that human population growth was placing on natural forests.

There is marvellous variety across seed pods from Australian trees. Much of this genetic diversity is stored safely in the Australian Tree Seed Centre.

Credit: Oliver Strewe

Next year, the centre celebrates 50 years of operation as a national facility for provenance-identified and documented seed of Australian trees. From CSIRO’s Black Mountain laboratories in Canberra, the centre has supplied wild and genetically improved seed from Australia’s unique woody flora to researchers, state agencies, private companies and local growers in Australia and more than 100 other countries.

Plantations from the genera Acacia, Casuarina and Eucalyptus are now globally significant, with millions of people – especially in tropical regions – dependent on them for their livelihoods. The significance of Australian tree crops is likely to increase in the coming decades as human population growth creates a large extra demand for wood products such as timber and paper, as well as for energy (heating and biofuel), environmental remediation and reforestation.

The ATSC serves an important role as a repository for the genetic diversity of Australian tree species. The collection is used by a wide range of researchers, who need well-documented genetic resources for research ranging from identifying tree crops for bioenergy to answering questions about phylogeny, speciation and weediness.

The centre also manages a large set of planted trial tree stands throughout Australia and overseas. Researchers use the stands as field laboratories to study aspects of the interaction between genetic and environmental variables – a research area growing in importance with the looming implications of predicted climate change. In some cases, the trial stands contain threatened tree species, and so serve as important repositories of genetic diversity.

A researcher visits a trial stand of Eucalyptus pellita trees.

Credit: ATSC

The ATSC currently stores 5000 seedlots from more than 800 species. The seeds are held in constant temperature rooms, cool rooms or freezers, depending on the species’ storage requirements.

The centre has an ongoing seed technology research program, which investigates optimal germination conditions for a species, seed storage techniques and factors affecting seed dormancy. The ATSC tests the germination of all stored seedlots every five years, and for many species, has tested a variety of methods to find the most effective germination pretreatments. Tests have been collated since the centre opened, and the results have provided germination standards for the many species in the centre’s collection. This comprehensive list of germination information for Australian tree seed species is available to the public via the ATSC website.

Sitting behind the ATSC’s operations is its seeds database, which stores information on all the centre’s seedlots, including location, germination tests, customers and dispatches. A model now used by other agencies, the database is also a central tracking system for any seed going into and out of the seed store, and allows customers to search for and order seedlots of species held by the centre.

Sarah Whitfield is Manager of the Australian Tree Seed Centre, run by CSIRO Plant Industry in Acton, Canberra.

Published: 26 September 2011

Renewable energy sector to benefit from wind-speed research

Craig Macaulay

While some recent international studies have shown a decrease in wind speeds in several parts of the globe, including Australia, more recent results from CSIRO show that Australia’s average wind speed is actually increasing.

The ability to accurately quantify long-term variations in wind speeds is essential to the viability of Australia’s wind power sector.

Credit: Gregory Heath

CSIRO scientists have analysed wind speed observations to understand the causes of variations in near-ground-level wind and explore long-term wind speed trends.

Accurate estimates of long-term trends provide a useful indicator for circulation changes in the atmosphere and are invaluable for the planning and financing of sectors such as wind energy, which need to map risk management under a changing climate.

‘We have a good picture of wind energy availability across Australia from previous CSIRO wind mapping and, with the growth of wind farms, there is an emerging need to understand how climate change can affect the wind resource,’ says Dr Alberto Troccoli, lead author of a recent paper published in Journal of Climate. ¹

‘Wind power production is expected to increase greatly over the coming years and the associated electricity system will be subject to variations of several hundred megawatts – depending on wind availability.

‘The ability to quantify with accuracy these long-term variations is essential to the sector from an economic point of view.’

Dr Troccoli said that, averaged across Australia over 1989–2006, wind speeds measured at a height of 10 metres had increased by 0.69 per cent per annum, compared to a decline of 0.36 per cent per annum for wind speeds measured at 2m height.

‘The potential for increasing the efficiency of energy operations by using quality weather and climate information is therefore apparent and one of the first steps is the standardisation of wind recording stations.

‘Wind observations, like other meteorological variables, are sensitive to the conditions in which they are observed – for example, where the instrumentation sits relative to topographical features, vegetation and urban developments.’

The team found that the wind speed trends over Australia are sensitive to the height of the station, with winds measured at 10m displaying an opposite and positive trend to those reported by a previous study, which analysed only winds measured at 2m.

Light winds measured at 10m, a height that represents better the free atmospheric flow, tend to increase more rapidly than the average, whereas strong winds increase less rapidly than the average winds. Light and strong wind measured at a height of 2m tend to vary in line with the average winds.

‘Our work shows a number of challenges with the consistency of the observations during their period of operation and between sites across Australia,’ adds Dr Troccoli.

‘The quality of future wind observational datasets will depend on having consistency between sites, particularly with respect to measurement procedure, maintenance of instrumentation, and detailed records of the site history.’

He said the work has implications for a variety of sectors beyond wind energy including building construction, coastal erosion, and evaporation rates.

The conjunction of energy and meteorology is the central theme of the International Conference Energy & Meteorology on the Gold Coast in November.

Read Dr Troccoli’s thoughts on What’s the energy forecast? Bringing meteorology and generation together in the online forum, The Conversation.

¹ A. Troccoli, K. Muller, P. Coppin, R. Davy, C. Russell and A. Hirsch (2011) Long-term wind speed trends over Australia. Journal of Climate, doi: 10.1175/2011JCLI4198.1

Welcome to the ECOS Archive site which brings together 40 years of sustainability articles from 1974-2014.

For more recent ECOS articles visit the blog. You can also sign up to the email alert or RSS feed