With the bioeconomy just around the corner, sugarcane and sorghum will be major players in our sustainable future. Both are fast-growing and generate useful materials and energy. What is important is to grow crops without a pollution footprint including greenhouse gases or water pollution from as fertilisers are lost from soil.

We collaborate with industry with the aim to help farmers who struggle to strike the right balance between feeding crops while avoiding off-site pollution.

Our research examines nitrogen-use efficient sugarcane genotypes and sustainable practices. Current research focuses on soil health, a foundation for high yielding crops and sustainable practices. Understanding the parameters of soil physical, chemical and biological health will allow designing better crop systems, which may include inter-cropping systems of e.g. sugarcane and legumes to reduce reliance on chemical nitrogen fertiliser.

Our research aims to improve nutrient supply to plants. This includes broad-acre and horticultural crops as well as tree seedlings for ecological restoration. We evaluate different forms of nutrients (organic, inorganic) and fertiliser formulations. This includes recyclates that enable the circular nutrient economy for a world without waste and pollution.

Current projects:

• Environmentally responsive nitrogen fertiliser – Advance Queensland Industry Partnership with UQ chemical engineering and company Manildra.
• Smart compost formulations – CRC Fight Food Waste, collaboration with company ‘Peats Soils and UQ’s Advanced Water Management Centre
• Next-generation fertilisers: phosphorus recyclates from clean sewage ash – a collaboration with the German Federal Institute for Material Research and Testing, the company Outotec, and the Helmholtz Institute
• Next-generation fertilisers that sequester carbon – funded by the Biosolids Industry Transformation Training Centre.

It is always possible to improve analytical techniques, and this is particularly true for soil research. Many current techniques treat soil as bulk commodity rather than complex ecosystems that house enormous biodiversity. The physical, chemical and biological gradients of soil, for example in the rhizosphere of plants roots have to be studied with minimum disturbance.

Soils supply essential nutrients to plants and are the largest terrestrial carbon store. We have embraced a new technique, called ‘microdialysis’, which was invented by neuroscience to measure fluxes of neurotransmitters in brains. We use microdialysis to quantify fluxes of nutrients and metabolites in soils to deepen understanding of microscale processes, including mimicking a root.

With 1000’s of chemicals exuded by roots and microbes, powerful analysis techniques such as FT-ICR-MS advances knowledge of the substances that are present in soils. We study root exudates that mobilise nutrients from soil and fertilisers. Paired with microdialysis, metabolomics is a powerful way to advance fundamental knowledge of plant-soil-microbe-fertiliser interactions.

Agriculture profits from microbial (bacteria, fungi) biotechnology. We are interested in beneficial microbes that live on or in roots, so-called ‘plant growth promoting rhizobacteria’. These microbes assist plants to access nutrients or boost resilience through beneficial hormones. We need to know which microbes naturally associate with plants and then examine if the root microbiome can be improved by inoculating with ‘better’ microbes than those present. Such strategy has been very successful with legume and nitrogen-fixing Rhizobia.

Beneficial microbes protect plants by priming the plant’s immune system or by fighting off pathogens with microbial substances. Many crop industries wish to transition from chemical to biological control. This demands fundamental know-how of microbe-plant interactions and techniques to formulate microbes effectively so that they associate with plants.

As we enter the United Nations ‘Decade of Ecosystem Restoration’, there now wide acknowledgement that is much to restore. This is urgent with many of the world’s species threatened with extinction and because degraded landscapes not only lose the ability to protect nature but humans also suffer.

Ecosystems regulate our climate, facilitate water and nutrient cycles, sequester carbon and generate the air we breathe. Ecosystems can be restored in many ways, from seed to tree planting, but all require soil. We study the effects of restoration of agricultural land back to tropical forest with view of soil and plants.

Australia is a botanical treasure trove, with many plants used for food, materials and medicines by Australia’s Traditional Owners. In partnership with Indigenous Australians, the oldest living culture, we study Australia’s plants for their uses in the modern world.