Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are 96 species of eucalyptus in the Blue Mountains World Heritage area in my electorate—just the eucalypts. Compare that to the entire British Isles, which has only 32 tree species in total. That number of eucalyptus species give you an inkling of our biodiversity and the importance of this wilderness for those cute, furry things that live in the trees, like koalas. I know this because Sunday was National Tree Day, and along with a couple of hundred other people I attended Science at the Local in Springwood and had the benefit of hearing from Professor Belinda Medlyn. She researches at the EucFACE project at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, which is situated in my electorate of Macquarie. It was set up in 2012 to study the effects of climate change.

The other great thing about trees is that they soak up carbon emissions—about a third of the world's carbon emissions, in fact—but the EucFACE experiment shows us that older trees do not have the same capacity to absorb carbon as young trees, and it just ends up coming out in the soil. They've also looked at how native trees cope with heat. The next project for these researchers is to track where trees are dying, because no-one's collecting that data. It's a citizen-science project called Dead Tree Detective. If you've seen a dead native tree or a patch of them that have died they need to know. Just google it, upload your photos and they'll do the rest, and you'll know you've helped science understand more about trees and climate.