Environment and Agrifood

Grain growers can access a more accurate view of the season ahead, using a UQ-built system called CropVision to forecast wheat and sorghum yields up to four months before sowing.

UQ researchers have developed an AI system that can identify birds in drone imagery up to 85 times faster than humans, helping conservationists monitor bird populations more efficiently across vast and hard-to-reach landscapes.

Understanding how genes, molecules and environmental factors interact to influence biological traits remains one of the biggest challenges in biology. The knowledge needed to build these models exists, but it is scattered across thousands of scientific publications and databases.

As the world seeks more sustainable and resilient food systems, there is growing interest in crops that can thrive in challenging conditions while delivering nutritional benefits.

Across Australia, thousands of projects use motion-triggered cameras to monitor wildlife, generating millions of images and videos every year. But those data have long been fragmented across separate systems and formats, limiting its value for national-scale monitoring.

Food waste is a significant problem in Australian hospitals – up to half of all waste a hospital produces can be food. This wastes not just food, but also the money and labour of these facilities – and food waste produces greenhouse gases.

Governments around the world face increasingly difficult decisions about how land should be used. Farmland, forests, conservation areas and carbon storage often compete for the same space, creating tensions between economic development, climate action and biodiversity protection.