Australian emblem appears able to resist Earth's distrupted climate system

Banksia plants appear
 resilient to climate change.

Banksia plants are Australian emblems, famous for their colourful flowers and dark, knobbly seed pods — the inspiration of May Gibbs’ big bad banksia men. Just like those banksia men, unerringly creepy after all those decades, their real-life counterparts may be just as resilient to the impacts of climate change.

Researchers from The University of Western Australia (UWA) and Department of Parks and Wildlife (WA) surveyed six iconic banksia to assess the impact of climate change in south-west Western Australia. Since the 1970s, south west Western Australia – one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots – has become warmer and significantly drier. In addition, the science of biodiversity has gone digital, through Australia’s largest online biodiversity resource, our Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

Honours student Sarah Randell from UWA deployed an army of 40 citizen scientists to survey six banksia species at 300 different sites between Kalbarri and Albany. They then compared the results with data collected over 25 years ago for the Banksia Atlas, another citizen science project, which is now freely available through the ALA.

Read the CSRIO blog - “Big bad banksias standing up to climate change.”