Invertebrate monitoring in the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest

Rainforest invertebrates have been monitored at permanent monitoring sites across the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest between 2006-2009. Such surveys were conducted on monthly to bi-monthly basis across the Spec, Atherton, Windsor, Carbine and Bellenden Ker Uplands during these years. The Wet Tropics rainforest of North Queensland has the highest biodiversity of any region in Australia. While world heritage listing of the area has prevented ongoing impacts from land clearing, our research suggests that the fauna of the region is highly vulnerable to global climate change. Almost half of the unique rainforest fauna could be lost with an increase in temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. This is significant as the IPCC fourth assessment report and regional climate models suggest that we will see between 1.0-4.2 degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2070: potentially causing a catastrophic impact on the world heritage values of the region. Long-term monitoring of the region seeks to understand patterns of biodiversity and to detect shifts in phenology of the invertebrates of the Wet Tropics rainforest. Insects were sampled using a combination of Malaise traps, pitfall traps, and flight intercept traps (FIT) at permanent monitoring sites across the Australian Wet Tropics.

    Data Record Details
    Data record related to this publication Invertebrate monitoring in the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest
    Data Publication title Invertebrate monitoring in the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest
  • Description

    Rainforest invertebrates have been monitored at permanent monitoring sites across the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest between 2006-2009. Such surveys were conducted on monthly to bi-monthly basis across the Spec, Atherton, Windsor, Carbine and Bellenden Ker Uplands during these years. The Wet Tropics rainforest of North Queensland has the highest biodiversity of any region in Australia. While world heritage listing of the area has prevented ongoing impacts from land clearing, our research suggests that the fauna of the region is highly vulnerable to global climate change. Almost half of the unique rainforest fauna could be lost with an increase in temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. This is significant as the IPCC fourth assessment report and regional climate models suggest that we will see between 1.0-4.2 degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2070: potentially causing a catastrophic impact on the world heritage values of the region. Long-term monitoring of the region seeks to understand patterns of biodiversity and to detect shifts in phenology of the invertebrates of the Wet Tropics rainforest. Insects were sampled using a combination of Malaise traps, pitfall traps, and flight intercept traps (FIT) at permanent monitoring sites across the Australian Wet Tropics.

  • Other Descriptors
    • Descriptor

      Insects were sampled using a combination of Malaise traps, pitfall traps, and flight intercept traps (FIT) at permanent monitoring sites across the Australian Wet Tropics.

    • Descriptor type Brief
  • Data type dataset
  • Keywords
    • Australian Wet Tropics
    • Invertebrates
    • Species distribution
  • Funding source
  • Research grant(s)/Scheme name(s)
    • 15549 - Climate change impacts on tropical rainforest biodiversity
  • Research themes
    Tropical Ecosystems, Conservation and Climate Change
    FoR Codes (*)
    SEO Codes
    Specify spatial or temporal setting of the data
    Temporal (time) coverage
  • Start Date 2006/01/01
  • End Date 2010/12/31
  • Time Period
    Spatial (location) coverage
  • Locations
  • Related publications
  • Related websites
  • Related metadata (including standards, codebooks, vocabularies, thesauri, ontologies)
  • Related data
  • Related services
    Citation Williams, Stephen (2013): Invertebrate monitoring in the Australian Wet Tropics rainforest. James Cook University. https://research.jcu.edu.au/data/published/6867fddeecabb13bd04f11d2224b26cf