Environomics – CSIRO Future Sciences Platform

The health of Australia’s ecosystems and biodiversity is essential to our nation’s well-being and economy.

The new discipline of Environomics will transform our ability to understand the origins, diversity, function and dynamics of complex biological systems, using a whole-of-environment approach. It is a frontier science, which brings together advances in DNA sequencing, evolutionary biology, big-data and environmental modelling.

CSIRO has invested in a national Environomics project as part of the CSIRO Future Sciences Platform. This enterprise will facilitate and significantly enhance a coordinated effort in Australia to boost our understanding and productivity across fields such as biodiversity, biosecurity, bio-inspiration, agriculture and fisheries, environmental monitoring and ecosystem remediation. Methodologies, analysis frameworks and visualisation techniques will be invented and organised to provide the Australian innovation system with a new genomics-based science platform to meet the 21st Century’s environmental and bio-based industry challenges.

The key aims of the Environomics Future Sciences Platform are to:

• Develop skills and expertise in the genomic analyses of non-model species, including accessing genomic data from specimens in CSIRO’s National Research Collections;
• Advance methods and applications in environmental DNA analysis, including improved bioinformatics; and
• Develop visualisation and modelling tools with which to synthesise and interpret the huge volumes of genomic, specimen and environmental data.

To achieve the aims of this project, collaboration will be fostered among research leaders, capability providers, internationally collaborative networks and research users.