In Queensland’s northern reaches lie the Wet Tropics, spanning about 450 kilometres between Townsville and Cooktown. These mountainous rainforests are a relic of the ancient continent of Gondwana, dating back million of years when Australia and parts of Antarctica were covered in rainforest. While much of the rest of Australia has dried out, the Wet Tropics have stayed wet.
It’s here you find green-eyed treefrogs, wompoo fruit-doves and striped possums with elongated fourth digits, for digging out grubs. It’s a particular hotspot of endemic and unique plant species too, including the colourfully named idiotfruit tree . Why is the region so distinctive? It has many different niches for species, from cool mountaintops down to hot and humid lowland rainforest.
As a result of its unique evolutionary history, the Wet Tropics are a biodiversity hotspot , hosting an array of species found nowhere else on Earth. Like many ecosystems, it is under serious threat from land clearing, invasive species and climate change. And these threats could be worse than we think due to the indirect, and often hidden ways they can affect the whole environment.
My research explores how species in these rainforests interact to forecast how rising temperatures and other environmental changes can lead not just to extinctions of individual species, but to the possibility of cascading extinctions as the loss of important species ripples through the web of life. Read more: Children born today will see .