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"Tropical rainforest research and management should be planned for the long term by natural scientists, rather than in response to short-term economic goals."
Speaking while opening the $1 million extensions to the CSIRO Tropical Forest Research Centre in Atherton, veteran ecologist Prof Len Webb said that even mainstream science had largely ignored the complex tropical rainforests of North Queensland until half a century ago.
But now Australia was a world pioneer in multi-diciplinary research into tropical rainforest management including its economic, social, intrinsic and symbolic values.
"We face totally new responsibilities in this departure from the exclusive 'cellulose production in the wild' which dominated tropical forestry practice in the past," he said. "Tropical rainforests are now recognised as an attraction worth more than $600 million a year to the region from tourism."
Professor Webb, who retired from CSIRO in 1980, is one of Australia's foremost tropical forest ecologists and advocates of rainforest conservation. He began his research in the Far North in 1945, searching for drugs in the tropical plants to replace those which in short supply because of the war.
A foundation councillor of the Australian Conservation Foundation and an active member of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland since it was formed in 1962, he was an early and ardent critic of the destruction of rainforests.
The Tropical Forest Research Centre in Atherton is a focal point of tropical rainforest studies, providing facilities for 45 research scientists and support staff from the CSIRO divisions of Wildlife and Ecology, Plant Industry, Soils and Entomology. The laboratory was first established in 1971 as a branch of the Commonwealth Forest and Timber Bureau which became part of CSIRO in 1975 through the Division of Forest Research.
Since last year much of the research has been coordinated through the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management, a partnership between CSIRO, three universities and the Wet Tropics Management Authority.
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Peter Trott[Level Up] [Doc Top] [Doc End] [Next Item] [Home Page]