Environmental Research Facility

My name is Peter Jones, I’m a senior technical officer here at UTS, I’ve been here since 1976 and still loving it.

We’ve got some great facilities here to support both teaching and research in areas of plant and wildlife. Some of the research that we do here with plants has found that plants have an incredible ability to remove pollutants out of the air, so we have these plant chambers where we are able to extract air out of the chamber and measure it before and after a plant is put in there to see how it’s improved the air quality.

We all know that cities are polluted and the air we breathe, it’s very important to us that it’s clean, and this research using the plant chambers is able to extrapolate what happens out in the city environment and also what happens in our office.

Although we’re a city university we have a glasshouse on our roof, a number of glasshouses actually and they’re all computer controlled to control the amount of light, and temperature, and even humidity in these glasshouses. By that we can run a whole lot of different experiments. So the glasshouses are providing a natural light source, very unlike in the laboratory, but much more like the real world.

One of our research facilities in the field includes the Port Augusta facility down at the arid land of the Botanic Gardens. Down there, they’re looking at the effect of high temperature extremes on desert plants, and how those plants are affected by them and respond to high temperature extremes. This is really important for looking at the effect of climate change to determine what plants are going to be knocked out, and what plants will survive.

Currently we have a group of researchers working in the field up at Kakadu National Park, looking at the impact of cane toads on quoll populations. This research feeds into the conservation of some of our really unique wildlife. The team is currently training quolls to reject cane toads from their diet.

We also have a Centre for Compassionate Conservation, which is looking at ways to manage our wildlife in a more humane way. The team is currently looking at alternative ways, other than culling, to manage population growth.

I’ve been at UTS but it’s been really exciting, we have fantastic facilities, and wonderful people working here, and we’d really love to hear from anybody who’d like to collaborate with us.