Dr Saul Cunningham is researching whether natural insect communities can be managed to benefit the sustainability of native vegetation and agricultural production.
Current activities
Dr Cunningham is the Group Leader for CSIRO Entomology's Functional and Spatial Ecology research group.
His current research at CSIRO Entomology focuses on insect communities in mixed landscapes of agriculture, remnant vegetation and re-planted native vegetation. Dr Cunningham is interested in understanding whether natural insect communities can be managed to benefit the sustainability of native vegetation and agricultural production.
His research projects include:
Dr Cunningham wants to find out if natural insect communities can be managed to benefit the sustainability of native vegetation and agricultural production.
Dr Cunningham is particularly interested to discover whether insect communities that develop in re-vegetated areas help or hinder us in meeting the goals of improved sustainability, better water quality and biodiversity conservation.
This research forms part of the Agricultural Sustainability Initiative theme within CSIRO.
Dr Cunningham is also an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Botany and Zoology at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, where he supervises research students.
Background
Dr Cunningham’s early research focused on the way in which animals influence the reproductive success of plants, including positive contributions from the pollination of flowers, and negative effects of animals that eat flowers and fruits. More recently Dr Cunningham and his colleagues have examined the effects of habitat fragmentation on reproduction by plants and the effects of plant density on pollen movement.
Pollinators are also important for their role in pollinating crops used by people. Dr Cunningham and his collaborators have worked on pollination of fruit and nut crops in tropical Queensland, and canola in southern Australia.
He has also been part of a global network of researchers examining the role of crop pollinators in world food production. This group has assessed the possible impacts of declining wild and managed pollinator populations. The work is increasingly important in Australia, where the Varroa mite poses a serious threat to honeybee populations.
He has also worked on a broad evolutionary scale, considering adaptations to herbivory in many different taxonomic groups of plants from New South Wales.
The presence or absence of certain insects helps scientists understand the dynamics of forest communities. The presence or absence of certain insects helps scientists understand the ecology of plant communities. Dr Cunningham has been involved in biodiversity assessment research, examining the invertebrate diversity of eucalyptus plantations compared to natural eucalyptus forests.
He found that big beetles were more common than small beetles in young plantation forest. This size difference has helped us to understand the different food webs that exist in different forest insect communities.
Dr Cunningham is interested in developing methods that allow us to predict what ecological functions are affected by the many insect species we find in such surveys, rather than just what they look like and where they were found.
Academic qualifications
Dr Cunningham has been awarded a:
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Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 1989
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Doctor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, USA, in 1995.
Find out more about the work of CSIRO Entomology.
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